Editing references

This is an adaptation of a presentation I gave to the Berkshire group of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading in March 2023. I’d been asked to cover the things ‘around’ checking references, rather than how to check the references themselves, with a few requests for specific topics. This is what I came up with.

This article is definitely focused on copyeditors. If you’re an author looking to improve your referencing, read my article on how to reduce editor queries by getting your references right!

Before diving in to either styling references, or looking up each one to verify all the information, and to fill in gaps and correct errors or raise queries, you need to establish:

• what you’re allowed to do
• what you’re asked to do
• what style is intended
• how far you’re expected to go – what does the budget support in terms of time and money?

If you’re new to working with references, an easy and short introduction can be found in the CIEP Practice Note References, which has a handy, if short, list of resources. There’s also the excellent CIEP course for much more depth: References.

Working with students

This is where the first question comes into play.

Find out:

• whether the student has permission to use a copyeditor or proofreader;
• what that student’s institution’s rules are around how much intervention a copyeditor or proofreader can make. Make sure you get a copy and read it carefully. Many institutions ban editors and proofreaders from touching the referencing at all;
• whether the student understands the limits of what you’re allowed to do.

Read the free-to-members CIEP Guide Proofreading Theses and Dissertations for much more information (the link will only work if you’re a member of the Institute and logged into the CIEP website. Non-members can buy the guide.).

If working with students is your thing, take the CIEP course by the same title: Proofreading Theses and Dissertations.

Working with publishers, packagers and authors

The first step is read the brief! What does it say about references? You may be required to do any or all of:

• style them
• check all citations have a matching reference, and vice versa
• order the citations (strings of parenthetical citations can be in alpha order by first author, ascending or descending date order, or left in the order the author thought of them or thinks runs from most to least relevant)
• look up each reference and verify what’s in the refs list, leaving an author query (AQ) for anything that’s amiss
• look up each reference and make it correct, by fixing spelling mistakes, dates, publication details, errors in the titles, errors in the author names, and the order of author names, errors around the status of authors (e.g. editors appearing as authors) and any of the thousand and one problems references are heir to
• test every URL and find an alternative if the link is broken.

The brief should also tell you which style is being used – and perhaps even give a few sample references.

If the brief is silent or missing (as may well be the case when working directly with authors), then you need to ask questions until you know what you’re being paid to do, and are satisfied there is enough time, as well as money, to do what’s being asked of you. Asking questions doesn’t show inexperience or inability – precisely the opposite! It shows you know the range of possible approaches and want to nail down what this client wants of you.

Establishing a referencing style

There are three main styles of referencing but endless variations on these themes:

• author-date (aka Harvard)
• short-title (where all the information is in notes, or in notes plus a bibliography)
• numeric (aka Vancouver) where each reference has a number, and only the number appears in the text.

Humanities tend to use Harvard or short-title; social sciences tend to use Harvard; and sciences tend to use Vancouver or Harvard, but there are no hard-and-fast rules.

Law books are a law unto themselves: in the UK they use OSCOLA, in the United States, the Blue Book.

You also need to figure out – if it’s not explicitly stated, ask the author their intention, if you have contact with them – what kind of references list you’re to end up with. Again, there are three main versions, and not all work with all kinds of referencing.

• References list: contains all references cited in the text, but only those. Works with Harvard, Vancouver and short-title.
• Bibliography: contains all the references cited in the text, but with additional ones for further reading. Works with Harvard and short-title, only. (Some authors want to reference everything they’ve ever read just because it’s influenced their education and thinking. If the author lets this slip, perhaps check with the publisher. Some insist on a strict ‘references list’.)
• Select bibliography: works with short-title only. Because the full references are in the notes, the bibliography can get away with listing only the most important sources.

You need to know this so you know how to edit. If you’re producing a ‘references list’ then you’ll need to raise AQs to see whether the author wants to insert citations and keep the reference’s entry before deleting the unused references. If it’s a select bibliography, you’ll know not to start padding it out with the ‘missing’ references, and if it’s a bibliography, you’ll know not to delete anything, nor will you need to raise AQs about missing citations.

I should add here that there is some confusion about which is the citation and which is the reference. In my world, the citation is the callout in the text to the reference, which is the full description of the source.

You need to be aware of all the main styles, and their chief variations, as part of your general expertise: Chicago, Oxford, APA, AMA, MLA, and many others publish style guides, and you should own the ones you’re asked to use. I’ve had briefs that just say ‘MLA8’ or ‘CMOS16’ (annoying, as the Chicago Manual of Style is now in its 17th edition, and you have to wind back – and remember not to throw out older editions of the style guides you buy!)

Authors will sometimes invent their own, but even these systems will have their roots in one of the three main types.

When you’re left to determine a style

Sometimes you’re just told to go with the author’s preference, or their dominant usage, and figure out a style to apply consistently.

For Harvard or Vancouver, start reading the refs list and pay attention to what the author has done about:

• capitalisation
• use of quotation marks
• use of full name or initials
• whether the second and subsequent authors have their initials first, or continue to follow the first author, with initials after the surname
• whether the editor(s) or the book title comes first when citing the volume a chapter comes from
• where the date appears – after the names, or at the end
• where the page numbers come for chapters – before or after the publisher details
• how edition details are given
• whether the journal names are given in full or in abbreviated forms
• whether the author has used a couple of em rules or similar to avoid repeating author names (this is rapidly dying out because even print books are now hyperlinked ready for ebook or PDF publication, and you can’t satisfactorily link to an em rule with good results, or so we’re told)
• how many places of publication are given per reference? None, one, two or more?
• is the publisher name given, or just the city? (Just the city is actually the preferred style in some fields!)
• when US states are included in references to American material. (Two-letter postal abbreviation, or the traditional abbreviations? Are states given for all US cities?)
• how the author has handled online and print references for, e.g., journal articles
• whether DOIs are used instead of links, or whether they’re included for print references, as well as online ones
• whether access dates are given for online references…

For short-title (notes, or notes + biblio):

• all the foregoing!
• whether the full title given at first mention in the book, or in each chapter
• how pinpoints are handled when there’s a page range in the full reference
• how URLs are handled
• how repeated references are handled – ibid., op. cit., and repeated author or editor names – id./ead., idem/eadem? Or is the short-title repeated, or the names repeated?

You should now have a feel for how the style is going to shape up.

You want to settle on a style that means the least work for you that still gives an acceptable result for the reader. This not only reduces your workload, it reduces the risk of introducing errors yourself.

The style sheet

If you’re deciding the style for yourself, add a sample of each type of reference to your style sheet. If you have notes as well as a bibliography, record a sample of how the references appear in the notes as well as in the biblio itself – it will be different.

Even if the style is prescribed, still add a sample of each type from this text to your style sheet. It will save you flipping backwards and forwards through the pages of a published style guide, or the publisher’s own if you compile a ready list of exemplars.

It also helps the style stick in your head!

References in other languages

It’s very common to have references in other languages and, indeed, in other alphabets and scripts. It’s quite normal for me to have references in a single book that come from more than a dozen languages.

Points to consider:

• are translations given consistently – or at all? Should they be?
• are only translations given of works in other scripts, or if not translations, transliterations? (You won’t be able to look up a transliterated title, in the vast majority of cases; there are always exceptions.)
• are diacritics consistently observed?
• have you added a note for the typesetter that these special sorts are needed?
• do you need to install additional language packs for Word to help you spot problems?
• have you bookmarked Google Translate, to help you identify the different parts of a reference? This is particularly helpful with grey literature, which often doesn’t follow the basic pattern of content. When I’m working with pre-edited files where every element of a reference is coded differently, it’s important to have the right style applied to the right bits of the reference.

Authoritative sources to verify references

I’ve been asked more than once what the best resource is to check references and it’s a very easy and, for some, shocking answer: Google! (other search engines are available…)

Just – google it! Honest. There’s no one website to bookmark that will give you all your answers.

You do need to prioritise Google’s hits. My own order of preference is something like this.

For books:

Ideally you’ll get a look at the imprint/copyright page, with the cataloguing information.

Amazon – for the Look Inside feature to check titles, names and publication details; also to check chapter details in the TOC.

If Amazon can’t help, then WorldCat often can, plus the websites for the British Library and, in the States, the Library of Congress.

Google Books can sometimes save the day.

For journals:

Ideally, you’ll see a thumbnail of the first page.

The publisher’s own website should provide full publication details (though some make you hunt around for the issue number) but most often won’t display a thumbnail unless you’re a subscriber.

JSTOR very often has the complete contents list for an issue, and thumbnails of the first page of an article; if you register for a free account, you can also read some articles, which may help if a quotation looks a bit off.

ResearchGate is useful, as it often has the DOI that will take you to the publisher’s website for fuller details.

PubMed often also has a DOI to take you to the publisher’s website and captures a generous definition of ‘medical’ by including a lot of social sciences, as well as having full details in a rather compressed form.

PsychNet usually has full citations for related articles.

NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research), in the United States can give a different version of a republished article from the one you’re looking for, often, so approach with caution.

For other fields, you may find other favoured sources, of course.

Google Scholar isn’t as helpful as the name might suggest. Semantic Scholar and Academia.edu give mixed results – it depends on how diligent the author was when uploading the file whether you get a thumbnail, full citation details, neither or both.

For grey literature

The publisher’s own site, primarily, but some grey-looking literature has been published traditionally, such as the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, so don’t ignore Amazon.

In desperation

I’ve checked out author’s CVs, published refs lists in other books (Google Books comes into its own for this), and every safe website Google (or your preferred search engine) throws out.

Sometimes it’s just not online; then you have to take a view depending on how well – or badly – the other references in the list have been produced and accept it as it is, make the obvious corrections to the basic style, and/or raise an AQ for missing information – chapter page range is often omitted by authors, I’ve found.

If you’re working with older sources, Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia!) can be a help as if often has images of the title page, carrying imprint information. I’ve had good success with that for books from the 19th century and earlier.

Broken links

If a link is broken, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can get you something that the current reader can use. If the author has specified a particular edition of data on a website and when you check it you can see it’s been updated since, again via the Wayback Machine you can find yourself with the view the author would have had when writing their text, and supply that link instead.

Finally: how far do you go, how long do you take?

One of the questions I was asked to address was how far do you go?

In the work you intend doing – that will depend on the brief. A regular client of mine specifies that I’m to supply and style missing information, and fix errors; if you’re working with students, you will be far more hands-off.

As for the work you end up doing: how long do you spend trying to chase down a shy or awkward reference? My rule of thumb, for the contexts I work in, is to spend less time than it would take me to frame the AQ, raise it and handle the answer when it comes back. So I’m happy to look up a handful of sources if it can be done quickly and easily, but if I’m going beyond five minutes on the same reference, it’s time to call it a day and either raise the AQ or just ensure the styling is right and move on.

How long does editing references take?

I aim for two minutes per reference as an average, which I’ve just confirmed over a 217-reference biblio that included a large number of German references, and a decent number of links to confirm or replace, with the author making several styling errors and occasionally missing out a chunk of information, like the journal name, and most of the page ranges for chapters. (OK, the average was 2.004 minutes each. Close enough.)

However, I know many editors who will allow up to ten minutes per reference – it depends a great deal on context and the referencing style

Try to avoid thinking about a standard ‘page’ of references, which is just as open to interpretation as a ‘page’ of text. Obviously there are huge variations in how long one reference will take – some references will be falling-off-a-log easy; others will need some delving, but by noting how long refs lists take you, and how many references they involve, you will get a feel for how much time you’re likely to need, or at least a range from easiest to toughest case.

If you’re being paid by the hour, then time isn’t so much of a problem in terms of your income, though it may be a very definite problem in terms of client expectations, and the deadline. If you’re being paid a fixed fee, get fast, and avoid the rabbit holes.