Chicago-Manual-of-Style

Citation managers like Zotero can simplify how you reference series. But what a citation manager puts out is only as good as what you put into it.

The “Student Supplement to the SBL Handbook of Style” can be helpful for classes. For anything not in a higher authority, see the 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘨𝘰 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘵𝘺𝘭𝘦.

CMS17 eliminates the use of “ibid.” SBLHS2 follows suit but does have a slightly different convention for how to format notes where “ibid.” would have appeared.

At present, Zotero’s “date” field doesn’t properly handle publications made over a range of years (e.g., 1950–1960).((Header image provided by Zotero via Twitter.)) Instead of including the full range in the corresponding note or bibliography entry, only the first year of the range would be presented (e.g., 1950). If the Range Has an End There is, however, a workaround that depends on entering the following syntax in an item’s “extra” field: issued: [first year]/[last year]. Thus, for example, if the extra field has issued: 1950/1960, Zotero would properly output a range of publication dates (thus: “1950–1960”). ...

With the release of the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, SBL style now defers to this edition in certain circumstances.

I’ve recently had a discussion over at the Zotero forums that brought to light a couple interesting points that I hadn’t been aware of: There’s currently in beta a major update to Zotero 5.0, which includes several important feature changes. The beta isn’t quite ready for prime time yet but should be “very soon.” Included in this update is the new Citation Style Language (CSL) processor that should remedy the comma and period placement issue in the forum thread. Frank Bennett has provided an updated CSL processor that can be installed in a current Zotero 4 version via the Propachi Vanilla plugin. For additional discussion of Zotero here, see this tag. ...

According to SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed., §§1, 3, 4.3.6, supports the use of “ibid.” From those descriptions, conventions look to be the same as for the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., §14.29. As an easy (and free) reference for students, SBL also provides a Student Supplement to the SBLHS. One of the courses I’ve been teaching has a comparatively heavier emphasis on getting to know the nuts-and-bolts of SBL style. And a keen-eyed student, pointed out that page 4 of the Student Supplement has consecutively numbered footnotes 78 and 79. Both notes are for the same source, but the second (note 79) does not use the “ibid.” notation. ...

SBL Press has some helpful clarifications about citations in the footnote-bibliography, or traditional, style.

Microsoft Word ties footnote anchors in the main text and footnote numbers at the start of footnotes to the same style. Consequently, it’s difficult to get full-height footnote numbers followed by a period (cf. Chicago Manual of Style, SBL Handbook of style). The process for getting this result discussed at Word MVPs does not seem to work in Word v16. But Word’s InsertFootnoteNow function can be intercepted to add the following macro commands to produce this result: ...