Ah, yes, citations. They make strong copyeditors cry and weak ones quit. When we discussed citations in my Copyediting III class last week, my students’ overall opinion was that they didn’t like them and would be glad to skip them altogether.
That may be possible with some clients, particularly if you’re working for an individual author rather than a publisher. But that’s not always possible. A scholarly publisher will want citations dealt with, and it may be part of your job.
When it is, what you do to citations and how long that takes can greatly affect your bottom line. If you’re getting a per-project fee, you want to minimize the time you spend on citations. When I asked her about citations, Copyediting blogger Adrienne Montgomerie, who works in educational publishing, said, “References are an area where perfectionist editors end up working for $1 per hour.”
I can see her point. You could spend hours going over every comma and trying to determine what the appropriate style is for an oddball reference.
If you’re working for an hourly rate, you could hand in a bill that makes your client faint. Copyediting’s event coordinator Laura Poole copyedits for scholarly journals and deals with lots of citations. She told me of one project where a colleague had fact-checked every little detail, and the bill was 10 times what the client expected!
Even in-house editors can have a problem. Missing deadlines because you were working on citations can mean less of an increase at raise time.
Generally, copyeditors edit citations but do not fact-check them. Editors should query missing information. Poole notes that she’ll spot-check titles and authors. “If something looks off to me, and if I can find what’s missing within 10 seconds, I fix it. If not, I query,” she said.
And all that work may not be worth trying to make citations match the house style, especially for so little money. “Rarely do bibliographic entries conform to house style,” said Montgomerie.
Not every publisher enforces that style, either. Some of Poole’s scholarly press clients don’t, for example. As long as the author has made the citations consistent with the manuscript, the press isn’t worrying if it’s Chicagostyle or another. While we copyeditors still have to ensure the author has been consistent, that’s much easier than having to reformat some or all of the citations because they didn’t follow Chicago.
Poole does cross-check the citations, however. “I make sure they were cited in the text and appear in the references.” That, too, is standard.
My own approach is very different: I write the citations for my clients. But my clients aren’t typical.
I primarily work for marketers, not academics, and they likely haven’t done citations since college. The manuscripts have only a few citations each—I don’t think I’ve seen more than 20 in one document—so doing them doesn’t take a huge amount of time. The references they cite are easily found online, too: articles from online publications, industry reports from research firms, videos found on YouTube, and so on. As long as they give me a link where I can get all the information (usually the webpage where the reference lives), it’s faster for me to write them up. And it relieves my clients from having to worry about it. As long as they’ve noted what needs to be cited, they’ve done their part.
No one likes to do citations, and it’s a running joke that no one reads them anyway (but I wouldn’t test that joke in practice). If you must do them, talk with your supervisor or author about what you need to do and what they need to give you in order to do it. Setting expectations helps ensure everyone is happy with the outcome.
This article was originally posted on the Copyediting website, April 28, 2015.
