Hi all! It's your friendly neighbourhood (if you're in Brisbane) academic tutor.
Today a student asked me how they reference a text in Chicago Notes-Bibliography where the text itself quotes somebody else.
For example, you might be reading in theologian Wayne Grudem's Bible Doctrine, 2nd Ed. and notice that he quotes Aimee Byrd, a well-known Christian author (not particularly charitably, in my opinion).
Now, if you want to reference Byrd's comments, you have two options:
Here's an example of what the first option would look like in a footnote:
Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), 101.
…and now here's the corresponding bibliography entry…
Byrd, Aimee. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020.
Here's an example of what the second option would look like in a footnote:
Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020), 101, quoted in Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022), "5. Does the Son eternally submit to the authority of the Father?," Perlego.
Please note that the above reference uses a section title instead of a page number. It's an eBook from Perlego without page numbers; where page numbers are not provided, you can use the name of the section.
As you may know by now, typically page numbers won't appear in a bibliography for a Chicago Notes-Bibliography styled document… so what do we do about the bibliography in this instance?
Simon Fraser University's (SFU) site on this topic1 offers an example that follows this formatting:
Byrd, Aimee. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020, 101, quoted in Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022. Perlego.
Note that the original and the secondary source appear in the bibliography.
While both the original and secondary source should appear in the bibliography, SFU acknowledge that their example is based off the Author-Date section of the Chicago Style Guide (not Notes-Bibliography, as we're using!). So my best guess is that, to avoid the complications involving page numbers, the two sources should constitute separate entries in a bibliography, as shown below:
Byrd, Aimee. Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2020.
Grudem, Wayne. Bible Doctrine, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022.
However, the Chicago style guide itself says that "to cite a source from a secondary source ("quoted in…") is generally to be discouraged, since authors are expected to have examined the works they cite".2
Tl:dr,3 Chicago's recommended approach is to read upstream and reference the original text. In the example given above, this is important -- because the referencing author appears to disagree strongly with the referenced author, it's important to read the original context of the original author's work to make sure they're not being misrepresented (and subsequently making you look silly in front of your marker or lecturer when you also misrepresent them in your essay). So, when in doubt, do a bit of extra snooping and stick with the first option. You will find that texts are prone to misinterpretation or misrepresentation more often than you might think.
If you have any other referencing questions, you can reach out to your local Morling campus' academic tutor at academictutor@morling.edu.au
To put it shortly, “because the notes and the bibliography references function differently”.
To put it considerably longer…
…Our brains (some more than others) tend to not do well when information is arbitrary. This is why your Greek (and maybe your Hebrew) teachers will tell you to use the most ridiculously visual memory device to remember a Greek word (a personal favourite among my Greek class was πίνω, for “I drink”, because it sounds like “pinot” of “pinot noir” - we thought it was a little cheeky and very memorable to talk about wine during class).
The ways information in references is organised together can seem really arbitrary, but there’s a reason why different referencing systems put things in different orders, and that often has to do with why different disciplines use different referencing systems.
For the sake of comparison, the American Psychological Association (or APA) uses a referencing style that places its citations in brackets (more specifically, parentheses; they’re the curvy things around this bit of text!) after every claim, paraphrase, or quote made in the text. This citation system looks almost identical to Chicago’s other referencing style, Chicago Author-Date. This referencing system is excellent for disciplines where you need to make assertions one step at a time and then show the other experts that agree with each assertion. These disciplines tend to have positivist philosophies behind them; truth exists and it is knowable through careful observation and experimentation. This includes the sciences; like physics and biology; mathematics; and even “softer” sciences like psychology.
The problem with this format is that all those pesky parenthetical citations can get in the way of the “groove” of your writing, especially in disciplines that rely on more nebulous concepts.
It’s like you’re telling a story to a friend, then you have to stop and remember where you put your keys for every step of the story. Stories (or, in the case of academic essays, arguments) only really make sense when you’ve heard the beginning, middle, and end. Throwing parenthetical citations in the middle of a complex, sometimes abstracted, argument will make the writing disjointed. This is why humanities disciplines (by nature often narratively-focused, subjective fields of study) will tend towards a referencing system that doesn’t rely on throwing beefed-up brackets into your text to substantiate your claims; instead, we tuck all the references into a sneaky little “pocket” at the end of the page (footnotes). Readers can go digging around in there if they want, or they can simply trust you to get on with the story (or argument) and come back to your references later. Theology is a humanities discipline; it’s about making sense of the Christian story in the lives of individual subjects and communities of humans. Part of theology involves recognising that our ability to grasp the truth about God and the world requires constant revision, and it isn’t as straightforward as conclusively proving a hypothesis, and then using that hypothesis to prove the next hypothesis. Like a good movie, if we’re going to understand the whole storyline, we have to watch the whole thing; we can’t just stop five minutes into the movie when we see something we don’t agree with or believe to be true. That would be selling the whole endeavour short.
For this reason, Bible and Theology at Morling uses Chicago Notes-Bibliography, a footnoting referencing style, rather than a parenthetical citation style like Chicago Author-Date or APA. We want to give your lecturers and markers (and maybe even your peers and other readers!) a good chance to catch the whole gist of your argument without getting “bogged down” in referencing information.
But because Chicago Notes-Bibliography doesn’t have to worry about being economical in terms of the “space” the citations take up in the body of the text, the footnote citations will include a lot more referencing information than in a parenthetical citation style like Author-Date or APA. The point of the footnote citations is to give the reader enough information to quickly and precisely look up the claim you’re making, to make sure you haven’t misrepresented what the original author of the claim is saying or (μή γένοιτo!)[1] completely made up a citation (I’ve heard from more than a trivial amount of lecturers that this happens - don’t get caught out!).
A Notes-Bibliography footnote citation will look something like this (I'll use a book format as the basis for my examples):
Firstname Lastname, Title of Text (City of Publication: Publisher, Year), page number/section name of quote/paraphrased information.
This information will represent pretty closely what might be on the cover page of a source you’ve used, such that the reader can locate the text (whether on a library book, through an Ebsco/Perlego search, or even just using Google) and quickly flick to the correct page.
Now it would be both cumbersome and inefficient (rather a lot like this sentence!) to have to include all of the above information every single time you make a subsequent claim in your assignments using the same source. So Notes-Bibliography allows you to use a “bare-bones” version of the footnote citation after the first time you’ve listed all the information, called a “subsequent citation”.
A subsequent citation will look something like this:
Lastname, Shortened Title of Text (Where Necessary), page number/section name of quote/paraphrased information.
You can skip out the first name, the publication information, and the year — if the reader desperately needs it to find the book, they know they’ll be able to find it earlier in the document, which they’ve probably already read!
The Bibliography part of a Notes-Bibliography reference is less concerned with making sure your reader can find individual claims that you’ve referenced. It’s more about giving your reader a complete list of all the works you’ve used, in case they’d like to do their own further reading. This is especially useful if used multiple publications from the same author; if your reader finds themselves really into your use of, for example, Karl Barth, then they can go to your bibliography and easily find all the Barthian documents you’ve used, handily filed under “B”.[2] The real strength of a bibliography is its alphabetical arrangement.
The bibliography entry should look something like this:
Lastname, Firstname. Title of Text. City of Publication: Publisher, Year.
Tl:dr, the differences between your notes citations and your bibliography are not arbitrary! They serve different functions; respectively, they help your reader quickly verify your claims, and they give your reader the chance to do some further reading into your topic.
If you have any other referencing questions, you can reach out to your local Morling campus' academic tutor at academictutor@morling.edu.au
[1] For those who haven’t yet done Greek, this means “may it never be!” or “by no means!” or, my favourite, “absolutely not!”. See Romans 6:1.
[2] Similarly to a subsequent citation, if you use more than one work by the same author in your bibliography, the subsequent (i.e. not the first one) listings will replace the author’s name with a line as long as your hanging indent. It will look like this ———