On Turabian

The Turabian, or Chicago, style of citation is the style that is used in all university level history courses in the U.S. that have academic integrity and in many publishing firms. The other two most popular styles, and in fact both are more popular than Turabian, are APA, or American Psychological Association, and MLA, or Modern Language Association, which is the oldest (founded 1883). This piece is going to compare these styles in terms of bibliographic, footnote/ endnote, and in text citations.^*

First up is the Turabian bibliographic citation style:^**

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, London: Yale University Press, 2004.

Notice how it has all of the information that you would want to know about the book used and is presented in an order that gives the reader the two most important parts of the citation first.

Next is the APA style:

Allison, H. E., (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. London: Yale University Press.

This is presented in a very similar way but leaves a bit to be desired. Notice how the author’s name is abbreviated and they give the year of publication even before the title of the book. The importance given to the year of publication is something that will be discussed in more detail later.

Finally, the MLA style:

Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. London: Yale, 2004. Print.

This style is simply the bare bones of citation and is of little use to anyone currently writing in the academic sphere. Notice that the subtitle is missing and the publisher is almost abbreviated.

In all, the bibliographic citation styles have evolved over time to include more information and have reached a point where they include mostly the same information, just in a different order.

Moving on the in text citations, we will look at Turabian first.

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”[1]’

Here we have an example sentence that introduces an un-original idea and gives a brief recognition to the original author and a footnote number for further information. Very simple.

The APA example would read:

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison (2004) calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”[2]’

Also fairly straight forward but awkwardly places the year of publication in the middle of the sentence, directly after the author’s name. Here we find that the APA style has a sort of fixation on the year of publication. My best guess, as for the cause of this, would be that it is most important to be current. Perhaps even at the expense of being correct? I really do not know. However, the style is not as simple, and can become downright cumbersome to a reader when citing multiple sources in one sentence.^***

The MLA example is:

‘To truly understand the inner workings of the mind one needs to understand that human cognition is discursive, in what Henry Allison calls the “Discursivity Thesis.”

There is no necessary citation as far as I am able to understand it. I am fairly certain that you do not even need to have Allison’s name on there. In a word, useless.

On to footnote/ endnote citations and here is where it becomes very different.

First up again is Turabian:

Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, An Interpretation and Defense: Revised and Enlarged Edition (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 13.

Here is all of the information that a reader may want from a footnote: author, book, publisher, year, and page. If there is any question about the quote the reader can easily find exactly where in the original text the information comes from. This is also the minimum amount of information that is acceptable style. In other words, it is perfect.

Next we will look at APA:

See Allison (2004) for his discussion of Idealism.

That is pitiful. We receive no further information than what the sentence itself provides. One could, of course, say more but the point is to show the minimum amount of information that is considered acceptable footnote style.

Finally we will look at MLA:

See Allison about the defense of Kant, especially chapters 1 and 2.

This is better, but still not very good. There is only slightly more information about where the original content came from.

All things considered, it is clear that the Turabian/ Chicago style is the best of the citation styles. The reader gets more thorough information from each type of citation, and in an immensely more readable form (considering the multi-cite example from APA).

So do both yourself and your reader justice and use the Turabian style.

^* I am getting my information on Turabian from Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers, 7th ed., ed. Wayne C. Booth et al. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007. The information for APA and MLA are coming from the Purdue Owl websites.

^** All in-text example citations are coming from an essay I wrote for a European Intellectual History course.

^***A made up example would read, “According to Marshall (2001), Jones (2009), and Charles (2011), the work of Smith (1990) can be discounted because he relied too heavily on the work of Baker (1982).” That is awful.

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