Text citation

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Dear Peers,I need a bit of help regarding proper and consistent use of text citation for an academic paper. I have consulted a few style manuals (Chicago, Turabian, and even MLA) but am having trouble figuring out how best to format this sentence:Trumbach, in his long-researched and anthropologically sophisticated work The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978), has proposed a constant dialectical opposition between the patriarchal and kindred forms of kinship and family organization.I am confused as to whether the author's last name, book title, and book publication date all need to be included. The paragraphs that precede the paragraph in which this sentence is typed use Chicago-style author-date text citation -- that is, (Trumbach 1978) -- without listing book titles in running text. Somehow, including all three elements seems redundant to me, but I am helping to edit a paper and am a bit out of touch with the citation style requirements of scholarly writing, so I'm not entirely confident of my hunch.The help of those on this forum would be greatly appreciated. I thank you for your time.

KrisBlueNZ · Accepted Answer

I'm no expert on this at all, but I'm sure I've seen citations with just Title (Author, date) so I would write that sentence:

Trumbach, in his long-researched and anthropologically sophisticated work The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (Trumbach, 1978) has proposed ...

I've added the author's name inside the parentheses, and removed the comma after the closing parenthesis. It's true that this duplicates the author's name, but I don't think that's a problem.

From a practical point of view, your original sentence seems to include all the information (author, title in italics, and date) required for a citation and it's clear that Trumbach is the author of the work, so it ought to be acceptable too.

Again, I'm just using common sense; I have no experience with citations specifically, nor with how those citation standards operate. So I could well be wrong.

Anonymous · Answer

Thanks so much for your attention to my post and for taking the time to offer a thorough reply. I really appreciate your input.

It turns out I found the answer to my question in a reference manual I hadn't consulted before posting my question: the APA style guide.

According to the APA guide, all three elements can be included (author, book title, and book publication date), but the date goes in parentheses and immediately follows the author's name, not the title of the book.

Including all of that information still seems a bit much to me, but it's a comprehensive means of making it very easy for a reader to access the sources the author has used, and if that's the way it's supposed to be done, then who am I to argue?

Thanks again for your help. Very best.

KrisBlueNZ · Answer

You're welcome. But I agree with the style guide that the date should appear after the author's name, and all of that information should be present. Perhaps not in the text; I guess that's what a bibliography is for, but all of that information is important, as would be an ISBN and/or URL.

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