Turabian Citation – Legacy of a Formidable Woman

Most citation styles are named after organizations (Associated Press, Modern Language Association) or schools (Oxford) under which they have been developed. In one case, however, the citation style is named after a rather formidable woman. Kate Turabian (born Laura Kate Larimore) started out as an obscure individual who was prevented from attending college due to a serious, prolonged illness. Working her way from an advertising agency typist to the University of Chicago’s dissertation secretary, she proved herself to be highly skilled in the use of the written word. From 1930 to 1958, every doctoral thesis had to pass her intense scrutiny for grammatical quality and source citation thoroughness. Mrs. Turabian’s insistence on the highest quality of form fit very well with the University of Chicago’s expectation of excellence for dissertation content, raising the bar to a standard maintained still today.

Turabian style closely parallels the “Chicago” style, save one immediately noticeable distinction. Turabian has only two specific citation styles, one used in footnote citations and one used in the end-of-document bibliographic listings. Chicago splits its bibliographic style into two, one for use when Harvard (parenthetical) referencing is used and one for when marker/notation referencing is used. Many argue this is a point of strength in favor of Turabian style. Beyond this difference, there is little to contrast Turabian with Chicago style.

Turabian Referencing Options

Those who do not like having text references dictated to them will like Turabian guidelines. Turabian citation style allows the use of both footnote/endnote referencing and parenthetical referencing. The decision between the two styles is left to the influences of the related industry or discipline standards and individual author preferences.

Marker/Notation

The marker/notation system dates back centuries to a time period where “printer’s daggers” were used on a page-by-page basis for noting information sources or side comments by the author or (in some cases) by the manuscript copier. The use of printer’s daggers fell out of favor over the years and was replaced by a numerical marker standard. This change has allowed referencing to enter a much higher plain and enabled writers and printers to incorporate the use of endnotes in association with the markers.

Under the numeric marker/notation system, each text marker has a corresponding footnote or endnote. This greatly increased the flexibility of referencing styles, allowing the scope to expand beyond individual pages, permitting chapter-specific references and even document-wide referencing as well as opening up new possibilities such as end-of-chapter endnotes and full-document endnotes.

The footnotes and endnotes associated with this referencing can be used for resource citation or for side information that fails to integrate well with the main document or may contain a side-thought of the author regarding the matter presented.

Parenthetical Referencing

Parenthetical (or “Harvard”) referencing was developed by a professor at Harvard University. The technique uses abbreviated citation information enclosed in parentheses within the body of the document itself (typically in a “name – date – page” format) to point to a bibliographic entry found at the end of the book or document.

It is possible and highly likely in some fields that students will encounter situations where a single author has several bibliographic entries to his or her credit from the same year. This is particularly common when the author is a journalist or writes for a periodical that issues multiple times each year. Citing the year alone is insufficient in these cases. This issue may be acceptably addressed by adding a suffix letter to the end of the year, based on the sequence in which the articles appear in the bibliography.

Citation Building

Building Turabian-style citations is considerably easier than Chicago-style since Turabian uses only two format styles: footnote/endnote citation and bibliographic citation. The order of citation elements is not the same in both citation formats, though all elements are included in both formats:

• Author Name et al. – As with all citation styles, the author’s name comes first. In footnote/endnote citations the name follows common usage (First I. Last), the others use the standard citation format (Last, First I.). Another difference is when using more than three named authors. In the footnote/endnote citations only the first author is listed, followed by “and others,” rather than Chicago’s “et al.” In both bibliographic citations, all authors are listed.
• Article Title – Used only in referencing periodical articles, articles in anthologies or entries in encyclopedias. Enclosed the article title in quotation marks.
• Book or Periodical Title – Always italicized in Turabian citations.
• Volume and Edition – Volume and edition information is relevant to periodicals and encyclopedias, though edition may also be relevant to textbooks.
• Editor’s Name – Typically found in anthological or encyclopedic citations. The editor’s name can also be in place of the author’s name if the author’s name is missing.
• Location and Name of Publisher – Should be used for all citations. The publisher’s name can also be used in place of the author’s name if the author’s name is missing and there is no listed editor.
• Date – The date should be highly specific when it comes to periodicals, citing month and day if available, otherwise be as specific as the information available.
• URL (accessed Date) – For materials found online, the URL (or address) of the materials should be noted along with the date accessed. The date accessed is important due to the volatile nature of the Internet.

Listing a forward, introduction or retrospective book source can be done in one of two ways. The writer can treat it like an article or book chapter reference or, when citing such materials, list the author of the extra material section first and alter the book title to read “Forward to …”, “Introduction to …” or “Retrospective of …” Then note the book author’s name after the book title with the prefix “Written by …”

Final Words

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