Notes on Citation
by Jack Mitchell
1. The Importance of Citing
This document provides guidelines on how to cite supporting evidence in writing papers, both in Prof. Peponi's seminar and in the larger scheme of things. You may be familiar with a lot of this, but it doesn't hurt to glance at it again, especially when it's as lucidly presented as here.
Citation style covers two things: the bibliography and the citations in footnotes. The citation style I describe is one that is at last becoming standard in Classics and in academe generally: Classicists call it "TAPA style" for short. (TAPA is the acronym for "Transactions of the American Philological Association," the flagship journal of the American Philological Association, which is the main association of Classicists in the world.) It's not the only citation style out there, but it's catching on and it's a good one because it does everything a citation style is supposed to do:
1. It provide all the information you need to find the work that's being cited;
2. It doesn't provide any unnecessary information;
3. It gives you a quick and easy way to refer to the work in the body of the text.
Other systems do seem pretty cumbersome by comparison.
Before getting to when and how you should cite supporting evidence, though, we should recall why we cite it. We don't cite in order to please the people grading or reviewing the paper (or book). We cite in order to strengthen the argument. That is, you want somebody to come to the end of your paper / article / book saying, "Gosh, I guess that's really the way it was -- wouldn't have believed it at first, but looks like it's pretty much iron-clad" (or words to that effect). If the idea behind making an argument is to persuade people that A is actually A1 (or B or even G!), supporting evidence is what lets you methodically guide your reader from one position to another, ideally with no important link in the chain of reasoning left unfastened by proof.
Of course, making an intellectual argument is not just a question of putting all the evidence forward and letting it speak for itself. On the contrary, evidence doesn't speak for itself: it needs to be assembled, first of all, and it needs to be interpreted; you also have to say why the interpretation is interesting or important. All this comes down to thinking and imagination, and it's the most important part. Evidence comes in when you want to make other people think about something the way you have thought about it. Moreover, by using citation to establish evidence (your own or others'), you also clearly distinguish between what is an idea and what is a piece of evidence; this allows the reader both to follow the structure of your argument (by following the chain of ideas) and to make up his or her mind as to whether that argument is well-grounded (by looking at your citations).
Beyond strengthening our arguments and thus winning intellectual glory, however, there’s another reason why we should cite, namely that it is quite possible that somebody will read our work (or find it cited somewhere) and want to know where we got our information / interesting ideas / etc. Believe me, there is nothing more frustrating than finding somebody (say, in an old 19th century dissertation) saying, "Of course, as Pindar tells us, virtue is a glowing flame" with no citation -- especially if one is writing a piece on "Glowing Flames in the Ancient World." In citing thoroughly, we also express our solidarity with posterity.
2. When to Cite
You may be wondering when to cite and when not to cite. The basic rule is: when in doubt, cite. It can't hurt. It looks impressive. Certainly there are a few cases where you should always cite:
1. When quoting a primary source.
2. When alluding to a primary source.
3. When quoting a secondary source.
4. When alluding to a secondary source.
It gets tough when you have to decide whether a given fact is well-known enough that you don't need to cite your source for it, or whether it really should be confirmed with a citation. Generally speaking, the literary genre of the academic paper is formal enough that you should cite sources for anything not well-known to the (hypothetical) general Classicist reader: if I was writing an email to a Virgil expert, I could get away with saying, "Of course, the ship race scene is the highlight of Book 5 " and leave it at that, but the general Classicist reader is not necessarily aware that there is a ship race scene in the Aeneid, so I should cite it. In this course, nobody expects you to be familiar what the (hypothetical) general Classicist reader does or doesn't know, but it doesn't hurt to err on the side of that reader's ignorance.
For indubitably well-known facts (eg. "Virgil was from Mantua"), you don't need to cite evidence unless you're contradicting that fact with some other piece of evidence (eg. "Though most people think Virgil was from Mantua, as his biography tells us [footnote > citation], some have argued he was actually from Antioch [footnote > citation]").
When you're picking and choosing sentences from a single passage or page of a secondary source, you can get away with citing that source at the beginning or the end of the series of sentences quoted -- i.e. you don't necessarily need to tag everything in quotation marks with separate footnotes all refering to the same page in the source. For example, if I have something like,
Professor Butler is not the only one to feel that Virgil's later poetry is "the work of a desperate man" who "knew he was teetering on the brink of immortality" as of the late 30's BC while nevertheless "fight[ing] a losing battle with the bottle"[footnote]; his views have found increasing traction in the larger community of scholars recently . . .
I only need to cite Professor Butler's article at the end of the third quotation; if these spanned a couple pages, I could indicate that in the footnote; if the quotations were not from the same part of Professor Butler's article, however, they would each need a footnote.
3. Bibliography format
Getting to the actual format of TAPA style, we should begin with the bibliography, because all the actual footnotes do is refer to the bibliography. Note that the bibliography generally only includes a) works of secondary scholarship, and b) translations of primary texts. Primary texts themselves can be cited in footnotes without having to refer to the bibliography -- see below under Footnotes.
Here is the how entries in the bibliography should be formatted, according to the type of secondary source (articles, books, and articles in books). Ignore the [square brackets] -- these are just to let you know which part of the entry is which. Please pay particular attention to punctuation (commas, periods, quotation marks, italics).
Articles
[Author's last name], [author's first name or initial(s)]. [Year of publication]. "[Title of the article, including subtitle if any]." [Name of Journal, sometimes abbreviated] [Number of journal]: [page range].
Examples:
Coleman, K. M. 1990. "Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological
Enactments." JRS 80: 44-73.
Lateiner, D. 1998. "Blushes and Pallor in Ancient Fictions." Helios 25: 163-89.
Schiesaro, A. 1985. "Il 'locus horridus' nelle Metamorfosi di Apuleio." Maia 37: 211-
23.
Books
[Author's last name], [author's first name or initial(s)]. [Year of publication]. [Title of the Book]. [City in which the book was published].
Examples:
Paardt, R. T. van der. 1971. Apuleius: The Metamorphoses. III. Amsterdam.
Walsh, P. G. 1970. The Roman Novel: The Satyricon of Petronius and the
Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Cambridge.
Colvin, S. 1999. Dialect in Aristophanes. Oxford.
Articles in Books
[Author's last name], [author's first name or initial(s)]. [Year of publication]. "[Title of the article as it appears in the book]." In [Editor's first name or initial(s)] [Editor's last name], ed., [Title of the book]. [City in which the book was published]. [Page range of the article in the book].
Examples:
Liviabella Furiani, P. 2000. "Le rire comme élément de communication non-verbale
dans les romans grecs d'amour." In M.-L. Desclos, ed., Le rire des Grecs.
Grenoble. 77-94.
Shweder, Richard A. 1993. "The Cultural Psychology of the Emotions." In Michael
Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland, eds., Handbook of Emotions. New York. 417-
31.
Manfredi, M. 1965. "Sull' ode 31 L.-P. di Saffo." In Dai papiri della Societa Italiana:
Omaggio all' XI congresso internazionale di papirologia. Florence. 16-17.
A few notes:
Indent the second and subsequent lines of each bibliographical entry, if it exceeds the first line.
For primary texts in the original language, cite it by the editor, but include ", ed." after the author's first name or intials --- eg., Allen, T. W., ed. 1912. Homeri opera. Oxford. You don’t usually have to include these in the bibliography.
For primary texts in translation, cite it by the translator, but include ", transl." after the author's first name or intials --- eg. Mitchell, Jack, transl. 2023. The Works of Homer. Iqaluit.
If there is more than one work by a given author in your bibliography, replace the whole of the author's name (last and first/initial) with "-------" after the first entry. Eg.,
Mitchell, Jack, transl. 2023. The Works of Homer. Iqaluit.
-------. 2026. "A response to various reviews of The Works of Homer." Classical
Quarterly 110: 23-51.
-------. 2028. The Burden of the Translator. Caracas.
If there is more than one work by a given author in your bibliography, order the works in chronological order.
If you include works published by the same author in the same year, distinguish them with a, b, c, etc. after the year. For instance,
Nagy, G. 1994a. "First Article that Year." CP 97: 20-41.
-------. 1994b. "Second Article that Year." Gnomon 72: 14-18.
-------. 1994c. Book on Greek Literature. Baltimore.
(There is some rule about what order to put these in, but I don't know what it is; it doesn’t really matter.)
4. Footnote format
The beauty of TAPA style is that the citation in the footnote is a clear, concise reference to the bibliography; the citations in footnotes don't make any sense without the bibliography.
Your footnotes should be continuous from the first page to the last (i.e. footnote 12 is the twelfth footnote in the paper, not the twelfth footnote on page 6).
Both in the text and in the actual footnotes, the footnote number should be in superscript (eg. example in the text12 | 12example in footnote).
Please note that, in terms of punctuation, footnotes go after periods, commas, and quotation marks; the go before semicolons and colons.
For modern works, cite the work as [Author last name] [Year of publication]. If you want to specify page numbers, use [Author last name] [Year of publication]: [page range]. Eg., Flower 1996: 129 refers to page 129 of a work by Flower published in 1996; information on the author's first name / initial, the title of the work, and the place where the work was published are all found in the bibliography. Nagy 1994b refers to the whole of the second work of Nagy’s published in 1994 which appears on the bibliography.
For ancient works, cite the page of the translation if you are quoting from / alluding to the translation (as though it were a modern work). If you are quoting from / alluding to the actual text (not necessarily the actual language of the text, but just the text itself as a work), use the conventional numbering system for that author. The format is: [Ancient author's name] [Ancient author's work's title if author wrote more than one work] [conventional numbering system reference]. For example,
Catullus 12.11 -- refers to line 11 of poem 12 by Catullus.
Plato Republic 512e-513b – refers to text appearing between 512e and 513b (completely arbitrary but fully established numbering points) in Plato’s Republic.
Homer Iliad 18 refers to the whole of book 18 of Homer's Trojan epic.
Iliad 22.190-197 refers to lines 190-197 of book 22 of the Iliad.
Athenaeus 14.12 refers to chapter 12 of Book 14 of Athenaeus’ only work, the Deipnosophistae.