User:Brews ohare/WP:Citations inside quotations

In writing a Wikipedia article, quotations from published works often are used, and these may contain citations or footnotes. To embed references in their work, different authors use different formats for the keys to their bibliographies. For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses the parenthetical designation (author year) with the year indicating the publication date of the work, while the Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of superscript numbers. This article discusses what should be done with these embedded elements of a quotation.

Whatever key format particular authors might use to embed references to sources in their bibliography, several issues should be kept in mind:
 * The embedded sources are part of the quotation, and if they are omitted the quotation should be ended with the parenthetical observation: (footnotes omitted) or (citations omitted).


 * The omission of the sources named in the quotation weakens the value of the quotation: after all, the embedded sources are recommendations of the quoted author(s), and their presence in the quote can contribute importantly to the quotation because:
 * (i) the sources are those the authors themselves have selected as support for the authors' assertions. By citing these sources the authors intend to aid the reader to set the context for their assertions.
 * &emsp;and
 * (ii) the sources supply the reader with the authors' evaluation of appropriate guidance to the literature of the subject, should the reader wish to pursue the matter further. Knowing what literature the authors deem significant to the subject can be very helpful, both in understanding the field and in understanding the authors' perspective about what works are significant to the field.


 * If the embedded sources are left in the quotation, the reader should be provided with guidance to finding these sources. Of course, the reader might be able to search the bibliography in the original source using the authors' keys to their bibliography. That requires some dedication on the part of the reader, and in some cases the bibliography may not be available, or be lacking in some details, leaving the reader hanging. For these reasons, it is preferable where possible to provide the reader with information to help locate the embedded sources.

Example
An example of text with embedded sources is the following excerpt: ""Some philosophers (e.g., Davidson 1963; Mele 1992) insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do. (For contrary views, see Ginet 1990; Sehon 2005...)...If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility (cf. Horgan 2007)...""

- David Robb and John Heil


 * Footnotes

This quotation contains references to the bibliography in the article "Mental Causation" with a bibliography key in the format (author year). Left in this form, a WP reader of this excerpt has incomplete information as to what sources are actually referred to by the (author year) designations, and so the issue must be addressed as to what aid should be supplied to the reader, and how that is best presented.

Omitting the citations
If the decision is to omit the citations, the text might appear as follows: ""Some philosophers insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do. ... If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility. ..." (citations omitted)"

- David Robb and John Heil


 * Footnotes

The practice of appending a parenthetical "(citations omitted)" is quite common in legal literature. Use of such a parenthetical is similar to others often found with quotations. Where several paretheticals are present, they are recommended to be placed in a particular order (bold face font added):
 * (date)[hereinafter short name](en banc)(Lastname,J.,concurring)(plurality opinion)(per curiam)(alteration in original)(emphasis added)(footnote omitted)(citations omitted)(quoting another source)(internal quotation marks omitted)(citing another source), available at http://www.domainname.com (explanatory parenthetical),prior or subsequent history.

These sources refer to legal practice, where it is common. In literary practice such changes are frequently placed in footnotes to the quotation rather than using parentheticals immediately following the quotation. A Google book search showing the common practice of placing the parenthetical "(italics in original)" in a footnote can be found here.

It may be noted that the use of the unaccompanied ellipsis (…) to indicate the omission of citations is inadvisable. The ellipsis is intended to indicate the omission of a word, sentence or whole section from the original text being quoted; not omission of a parenthetical concerning a citation or a footnote.

Including the citations
One approach simply is to leave the quotation in its original form, and let the reader fend for themselves.

However, assuming the desirability of identifying embedded sources such as (author year), how is it done? The first approach that comes to mind is simply to insert WP footnotes containing the information in the cited work's bibliography. Some difficulties arise in doing this. One is that the bibliography may omit some information the reader could find useful, such as links, doi or isbn numbers. Another is that the source may be out of print, or otherwise unavailable. For example, the original source may available only by paid subscription, while an accessible pdf-version may be supplied on an author web site, or available in a Google-accessible collection of journal reprints. Thus, the bibliographic information might be usefully supplemented, but because that departs from the original work, any modification of the original bibliography should be identified as separate from the quoted material.

Here are several approaches to this issue. One is to paraphrase the source and add WP footnotes outside the quoted material, so it will not be confused with the quote:
 * Robb and Heil suggest that some philosophers, for example, Davidson and Mele, "insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do." [For contrary views, these authors suggest Ginet or Sehon. ] "If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility..." [The authors suggest comparing this view with that of Horgan. ]


 * Footnotes

A second, not-very-different, approach avoids paraphrasing and includes a sequence of WP footnotes outside the final quotation marks:

""Some philosophers (e.g., Davidson 1963; Mele 1992) insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do. (For contrary views, see Ginet 1990; Sehon 2005...)...If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility (cf. Horgan 2007)...""

- David Robb and John Heil


 * Footnotes

A third approach, possibly the simplest, is to put footnotes where they are in the original text, but include the original context for the footnotes (for instance, asides like cf. or e.g.):

""Some philosophers insist that the very notion of psychological explanation turns on the intelligibility of mental causation. If your mind and its states, such as your beliefs and desires, were causally isolated from your bodily behavior, then what goes on in your mind could not explain what you do... If psychological explanation goes, so do the closely related notions of agency and moral responsibility... ""

- David Robb and John Heil


 * Footnotes

Footnote format
The WP footnote supplies the reader with information that may not be identical with that supplied by the original source of the quotation. Some of this supplementary information is not controversial, like doi or isbn numbers, but some may be more so, for example, where alternative sources are supplied that are more readily available than the original, for instance, later editions for books that are out of print, or links to open-access copies of articles rather than to paid-subscription journal articles.

To alert the reader about any such changes from the original, the WP footnotes begin with disclaimers warning the reader that the source identification is not exactly that of the quoted source. Where appropriate, these disclaimers should be very explicit about the differences. For example: A later edition of the cited source is:..., or A more accessible author-supplied pdf-version of this source is....

Although it is not mandatory in WP to use them, providing source information using various templates makes it easy to remember what information should be provided, and the templates automatically maintain a standard format for this information. Some of these templates are listed in the See also section below.