He Was a Citation Detective

I do some copy-editing for an academic journal, a pastime I have come to really enjoy. Unlike most things in the academic world, there is one right answer to how to cite something in MLA style! It's particularly enjoyable, I think, when the writer you're editing doesn't know what they're doing. I mean, I do get exasperated, but at the same time, the greater the challenge the greater the feeling of success. This most often happens when writers coming out of disciplines that don't typically use MLA style publish in our journal. I don't hold this against them; if I published in a journal that used Chicago, I think I'd be equally at sea! (I once published an article in a journal that used MHRA, which I'd never even heard of until I was forced to adopt it, so that was fun.)

One thing I have discovered is that a lot of the time you are better off doing something yourself than asking the author to fix it. Maybe this is encouraging bad behavior on the part of writers, but you might notice the author left out a piece of information and ask them to include it, but then when they add it and bounce it back to you for another look, you realize they did so incorrectly, so you have to fix what they fixed. In that case, why not fix it yourself to begin with, and save everyone the bother? This means I often find myself looking up page numbers when authors leave them out. If the source being quoted is in an academic journal, this usually isn't too tricky, but often I am scraping through Amazon's "Search Inside" feature, Google Books, and even the Internet Archive in my desperate attempt to figure out what page a quote might come from.

Google Gemini's take on "Generate an image of a citation detective."

This occasionally means you find out that the author has actually miscited the original source! Once you find an author has gotten one quotation wrong, then you approach others with increased scrutiny... but it does make you worry that there are misquotations getting by you that you did not notice, because who can check every quotation?

On other occasions, I find myself playing citation detective. For example, an author once added some in-text citations to a paper during revisions... only they forgot to add the sources to the Works Cited page. I could have bounced the paper back to them and asked them to do it, but I decided it would be easier to find and cite all the sources myself, and just ask them to verify that I had added the correct citations.

Recently, I had a particularly difficult-but-fun instance of playing citation detective. I always do the Works Cited first when copy-editing; on this occasion there was a citation that read, let's say:

Theorist X. "Chapter Title Y." Place of Publication: Publisher, Year. URL. 

What was clearly missing was the name of the book the chapter came from as well as the page range. So I clicked on the URL and was taken to the source, which was a PDF. But it was weird, because there was no clear indication of what book the chapter came from... and furthermore, the way the heading was formatted made me think this wasn't "Chapter Title Y" by Theorist X, but actually a piece called "Theorist X: Chapter Title Y." This was confirmed when I skimmed the piece and realized it consistently referred to Theorist X in the third person. If this was by Theorist X, then Theorist X was a very strange person indeed.

ChatGPT's take on the same prompt.

I did some googling and what I discovered very quickly was that lots of people cited the piece as being "Chapter Title Y" by Theorist X. But surely this was not the case! The PDF was on the web site of an academic publisher, but I could find no reference to it on the web site; clearly whatever page originally lead to the PDF had been taken down in some kind of reorganization (the date given was around twenty years ago), but the PDF itself had never been deleted.

I began googling what seemed to be key phrases from the piece. This lead me to a textbook by Author Z, which had a chapter about Theorist X. But this chapter came from the middle of Author Z's textbook, yet the PDF was numbered from page 1 up. Was this a preview of the textbook or something, with its own pagination? I couldn't get to the full text of the textbook anywhere, but I was able to look at its table of contents on the Internet Archive, and I could see that the section headings in the textbook chapter didn't exactly line up with the section headings in the PDF. So what was going on? Was it from a different edition of the textbook than the one I had found?

Eventually, I googled a different sentence from the PDF and found someone quoting that sentence on their blog—and thankfully that person gave a clear attribution. It was from something by Author Z, but a different textbook to the one I had found. This textbook had had some supplemental chapters that were only published online, on the publisher's web site. I was able to find that textbook on the Internet Archive, and the textbook's introduction explained all this, and gave the URL for where you could read the web-only chapters... a URL that was long defunct. But this was enough for me to feel confident I'd figured out what was actually being cited. So I constructed a new citation:

Author Z. "Theorist X: Chapter Title Y." Title of Textbook, Publisher, Year. Title of Publisher Site, URL.

I then had to go through all the in-text citations and edit them to make it clear the paper was not citing the work of Theorist X directly, but Author Z's summary of Theorist X.

I felt quite a sense of accomplishment when I was all done! In fact, I ran down to the office of the journal's editor and told her the whole thing because someone had to know. No one reading the essay will ever know, but academic work is founded on careful and accurate engagement with the words of others, and so it's quite important this stuff is right. And while everyone else citing "Chapter Title Y" has given credit to the wrong person, Author Z will get their due in our journal at least.