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Sometimes, journal articles are too long for their usual format.¹ So, they get serialized, or broken up across multiple journal issues.

The guidance that the SBL Handbook of Style provides for how to cite these articles contains a couple ambiguities. But assuming for the moment, however, that proper resolutions for these ambiguities are discernible, how might you accommodate such a citation with Zotero?

Serialized Articles within the Same Volume

If all of the parts of a serialized article appear in the same volume, as with the Wildberger example, all you really need to do is to include all of the different parts’ page ranges in Zotero’s “Pages” field.

In this way, you could get citation and bibliography information like

David W. Chapman and Andreas J. Köstenberger, “Jewish Intertestamental and Early Rabbinic Literature: An Annotated Bibliography Resource Updated Again,” JETS 63 (2020): 559–609, 789–843.

Chapman, David W., and Andreas J. Köstenberger. “Jewish Intertestamental and Early Rabbinic Literature: An Annotated Bibliography Resource Updated Again.” JETS 63 (2020): 559–609, 789–843.

Serialized Articles across Multiple Volumes

For articles serialized across multiple volumes like the Wellhausen example, you’ll want to enter

• the earliest volume’s year in Zotero’s “Date” field and page range in the “Pages” field followed by the volume number, year, and page ranges for the subsequent parts of the article or
• the latest volume’s year in Zotero’s “Date” field and page range in the “Pages” field because you’ve included all of the earlier volume information in the “Volume” field.

Zotero doesn’t have a “serialized journal article” item type to allow you to specify the individual volumes and pages for those volumes where an article was serialized. But either of these methods will allow you to shoehorn the information you need into the appropriate Zotero record. Zotero will then be able to produce citations like those shown below.

M. Pabst Battin, “Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics,” JAAC 32 (1974): 155–70; 33 (1975): 293–302.

Battin, M. Pabst. “Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy in the Poetics.” JAAC 32 (1974): 155–70; 33 (1975): 293–302.

Just be aware that a side-effect of this shoehorning is that Zotero won’t be able to automatically

• transform hyphens to en dashes in some of your page ranges or
• abbreviate the last page number in the range according to the rules that SBL style uses.

So, you’ll need to ensure you enter an en dash (rather than a hyphen) and abbreviate the page range as appropriate for yourself when entering the item’s Zotero record.

Now, as to the addressing the special difficulties with this type of citation, you might be able to avoid both of them if you

• simply make your first citation a citation of the serialized article as a whole and
• don’t subsequently need to specifically cite any pages that occur in more than one of the serialized articles.

Citing Part of a Serialized Article Only on the First Reference

But if you need to cite something less than the whole serialized article the first time you cite that source, you can create a second Zotero record just for the sub-part of the article you need to cite.

So, you might have two journal article records with the title “Die Composition des Hexateuchs.” One would include the full serialized information; the other would include only the information for the part you need to cite individually.

In your footnotes, you would use only the one with the part of the article. That way, Zotero could produce short or full notes properly.

When it comes time to produce a bibliography, you’d then use the Add/Edit Bibliography tool to remove this record and insert instead the record with the full serialized article information.

Disambiguating Page References in Short Citations

You can easily disambiguate page page references to particular articles in a series from the citation dialog. In the locator field there, you’ll just enter the volume number, a colon, and the page range you want to cite (e.g., “21:407–50” in the Wellhausen example).

When you do so, just be aware that having the volume number in the locator field won’t allow Zotero to transform hyphens into en dashes or abbreviate the last number of a page range as it usually does. So, you’ll need to enter these components as such (i.e., the text “–50” in the Wellhausen example).

Conclusion

SBL style involves several specific details that can prove challenging to accommodate consistently. Nevertheless, Zotero is able to handle even cases like serialized journal articles.

It can take some massaging and trial-and-error to see exactly how best to incorporate the data you need to get the citation format you’re looking for. But once you’ve got that saved in Zotero, it isn’t something you’ll need to bother with further.

1. Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter. ↩

Journal articles are usually comparatively brief pieces. But every so often, one will be too large for a single publication. So, a journal might choose to serialize that article into two or more parts.

When this happens, SBL style requires that

If a multiple-part article includes “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and the like as a part of the title, omit the “part” specification and cite only the primary title. Including a part number in the first reference complicates short-title citations for later references, since one would then need to include the part number as a part of the short-title reference.¹

This requirement then entails some changes to the typical way of citing a journal article and to how such serialized articles are handled in Zotero.

What SBL Style Requires

Instead of citing each “part” article independently as its own piece, SBL style prefers concatenated citations like the examples below.

21. Hans Wildberger, “Das Abbild Gottes: Gen 1:26–30,” TZ 21 (1965): 245–59, 481–501.

Wildberger, Hans. “Das Abbild Gottes: Gen 1:26–30.” TZ 21 (1965): 245–59, 481–501.

24. Julius Wellhausen, “Die Composition des Hexateuchs,” JDT 21 (1876): 392–450; 22 (1877): 407–79.

Wellhausen, Julius. “Die Composition des Hexateuchs.” JDT 21 (1876): 392–450; 22 (1877): 407–79.²

As the Wildberger example shows, this citation pattern nicely compresses the serial article information when all the parts of an article are published in the same volume.

On the other hand, the Wellhausen example illustrates two difficulties that arise when an article spans multiple volumes. For these difficulties, other authorities (e.g., Turabian, Chicago) appear to provide no guidance.

1. Specific Initial Citations

The given example of an initial citation for Wellhausen’s article works well if you want to cite that serialized article as a whole. But how should you format the citation if you wanted to cite, for example, pages 395–400 the first time you referred to the article?

One approach here might be to cite just the pertinent part’s information in the footnote but then the full serialized article’s details in the bibliography. In this way, you would have

24. Julius Wellhausen, “Die Composition des Hexateuchs,” JDT 21 (1876): 395–400.

Wellhausen, Julius. “Die Composition des Hexateuchs.” JDT 21 (1876): 392–450; 22 (1877): 407–79.

2. Ambiguous Short Citations

The second difficulty is that a short citation for an article like Wellhausen’s might normally be

Wellhausen, “Composition,” 407–50.

But this page range occurs both in the 1876 article from volume 21 and in the 1877 article from volume 22. So, a reader would need to consult the text of both articles to be sure of locating the section the author is referencing. But it’s presumably better to avoid an ambiguous reference. So, the form

Wellhausen, “Composition,” 21:407–50.

suggests itself as a reasonable solution on analogy to the citation pattern given for multivolume works.³

Conclusion

Hopefully, how best to address the particular challenges raised by this type of citation will be something that SBL Press will clarify in the future.⁴ Meanwhile, even this citation type is something Zotero can certainly handle, including the guesses I’ve made above for what to do in the couple unclear situations.

1. Society of Biblical Literature, The SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: SBL, 2014), §6.3.2. ↩

2. Society of Biblical Literature, SBL Handbook, §6.3.2. ↩

3. Society of Biblical Literature, SBL Handbook, §6.2.20. ↩

4. I’ve written the Press to inquire whether about this but thus far have yet to hear back. ↩

For the kind of responsibilities authors have in biblical studies, Microsoft Word does a lot of things well.¹ It does a lot of other things passably. And other things take fiddling until you find the setting or workflow that makes Word work well for you.

Not infrequently, that fiddling involves cases where Word is trying to be too helpful in a given direction. That direction might be helpful for most users. But it might sometimes also run counter to what’s helpful for the kind of writing you need to do as a biblical scholar.

Word’s Automatic Language Detection Option

A case in point is the language box, which contains an option to “detect language automatically.” That sounds helpful, right?

If I turn it on, maybe it will keep me from having to tell Word “This text is Greek [or Hebrew or whatever], and no, I don’t want you to try to proofread it for me.”

Maybe it will mean less distraction from fewer red squiggly or double blue underlines as Word stops trying to suggest improvements for non-English text as if it were English.

Problems with Word’s Automatic Language Detection

Maybe the setting does do some of that. But by far the biggest difference I notice when it’s on is that combining Greek diacritics don’t actually combine. Or if they do, they don’t stay combined.

So, for instance, what should be

will come out as

The diacritics are all dislocated right, up, or both from where they should appear. For some reason, Word’s automatic detection of this text as Greek (besides the English insertion) causes it to mishandle the placement of the diacritics.

And it’s not just a display issue. The diacritics also print in their dislocated positions.

Reapplying language formatting by manually selecting Greek in the language box resets the diacritics to their appropriate positions for a time. But they have a habit of repeatedly “forgetting” where they’re supposed to appear. This presumably happens when Word next automatically assesses what language it thinks a given string of text is.

Conclusion

So, if you’re finding that your diacritics are getting dislocated, check whether Word’s “detect language automatically” setting is enabled. If it is, you might find yourself needing to turn it off and fix each place where Word “helped” identify the language of a given portion of text. But on the upside, disabling the setting should allow your corrections to remain and not be overwritten.

Consequently, despite it’s helpful sound, you probably want to avoid enabling Word’s “detect language automatically” setting. Instead, simply set the language as needed for a given string of text either through the language box or via a style.

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1. Header image provided by the Noun Project. ↩

Individual vocations require specific kinds of formation.¹ Dentists undergo one kind of formation for their craft, lawyers another, biblical scholars still another.

Although the fact is sometimes obscured by standard preparatory curricula, this formation is a kind of spiritual formation. It’s all the more so if you’re undertaking it to obey a calling you believe God has on your life.

Some elements of this spiritual formation are distinctive. Others are shared across vocations, even when they aren’t explicitly addressed in preparatory curricula. One example might be the fruit of the Spirit in Gal 5:22–23. For instance, both the Christian dentist and the Christian biblical scholar are called to kindness and self-discipline.

On the other hand, these vocations often require even their common elements of formation to be “inflected” in different ways.² How, for example, the virtues of kindness and self-discipline get inflected, or contextualized, will differ somewhat for dentists and for biblical scholars.

Resources for Inflection

In that context, I’ve taken encouragement from some recent discussion in the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology to develop a start to a core, annotated bibliography for how spiritual formation can be inflected, or contextualized, for academic life.

In several cases, I would differ with some of the ideas in these volumes. Some readers may also find there to be occasional instances of objectionable language in some of these volumes (e.g., Pressfield’s).

So, as goes the general principle, so here too—a work being included doesn’t indicate wholesale endorsement of it. Where differences are particularly pertinent to the topic, I’ve tried to comment on them in the accompanying annotations. Such things notwithstanding, I’m hopeful that others may find as much profit in these texts as I and others have.

If you have suggestions for additions, please feel free to add those in a comment on this post. Though, please do note that I’ll be selective in making any additions to the bibliography per se in order to keep the main list as close as possible to what seems likely to be most helpful.

Bibliography

1. Header image provided by Eugenio Mazzone. ↩

2. For this language of “inflection” of spiritual formation, I’m grateful to Craig Bartholomew. ↩