Reference list v. Bibliography

I’ve been neck-deep in reference lists and bibliographies this week, learning precisely where spaces go and don’t go (and how that changes if there’s an issue number after the volume number—which is surprisingly much). Chicago Manual of Style devotes chapters 14 and 15 to these two topics. Reference lists are used along with author-date citations and are popular in some of the social sciences. Bibliographies allow you to include works that aren’t directly cited in the text. If you write for a journal, you surely follow whatever style the journal uses, and it might be APA or some other style.

But here’s what I noted from CMOS. After the first 2.5 hours on the homework assignment, I started to get into a groove. I was finally understanding what I was looking at and how it should appear. That much back and forth on every piece of punctuation, the sequencing of names, whether one preposition-like word in the title should be capitalized because it’s functioning as an adverb.

And what it all boils down to is this:

Bibliography entry:

Zimmer, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946.

Reference list entry:

Zimmer, Heinrich. 1946. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Edited by Joseph Campbell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

See that? Gasp! The year is in a different place!

My instinct is to point out that CMOS could save a whole lot of pages if it chose one place for the year to go and declared done with it. But this feels like a decision that evolved over time with a healthy dose of “that’s the way we’ve always done it” thrown in.

And so I’ll keep working to learn the differences, because they must amount to more than merely moving the year, right? (Right??)