Square Brackets vs Parentheses in Chicago-Author-Date

[coryschires]

Reposted from https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/square-brackets-vs-parentheses-in-chicago-author-date/1637

Background

Chicago-Author-Date dictates that in-text cites should be placed inside parentheses (e.g. (Smith 2014)).

But (it seems?) there's also a lesser known requirement... If the in-text cite is placed within parentheses, then the in-text cite should be placed inside square brackets – not parentheses as you normally would:

Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition. Pages 902-906.

Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition

Problem / Questions

• As far as I can tell, the CSL spec / Citeproc doesn't cover this behavior. Is that correct?
• Assuming that's correct, how are people handling this requirement?
• Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

[bdarcus]

Thanks for this @coryschires!

As I said on discourse, I'd oddly enough never come across this.

I think an easy way to support this would be to add two new attributes to layout: something like inner-prefix and inner-suffix. Default values for those would be nil.

At least, that's my initial thought. Hopefully it's not more complicated than this.

[denismaier]

As on discourse:

I think that is a fairly common rule. You do this in German as well. (Basically like the double quotes-> single quotes flipping if you're in double quotes already.)

The problem here is that you’ll have to check for context – are we in parentheses already or not. (And: the surrounding parentheses will be part of the main text, not of the citation.) In a plain text system that might be possible, but I don’t know if that could work with ms-word etc.

So it's more an api question than for CSL proper. (The csl part should indeed be easy.)

[denismaier]

Also requested by APA 6th edition: https://guides.library.nymc.edu/c.php?g=567729&p=4609898

[bdarcus]

So we should figure this out. I've assigned this to everyone that might have some good ideas.

[denismaier]

We'll perhaps also need input from @dstillman @adomasven and @jgm.

[adam3smith]

Quick note without much time to contribute: This is very much not the first time this has come up. There's a long thread from 10+ years back involving several of us (Bruce, me, Frank): https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/112694/#Comment_112694 I'm linking to Frank's comment announcing a citeproc-js solution for this & linking to a test (only seeing that test on the old bitbucket currently).

…

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 4:24 PM Denis Maier ***@***.***> wrote: We'll perhaps also need input from @dstillman <https://github.com/dstillman> @adomasven <https://github.com/adomasven> and @jgm <https://github.com/jgm>. — You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/218#issuecomment-637082870>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAA7PWQ2S3RX6EMD2PKVO5LRUQE7HANCNFSM4NQB6HNA> .

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[bwiernik]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I recall Frank coming up with a nice processor solution that flipped parentheses/brackets very nicely a while back.

[bwiernik]

@adam3smith My sense is that this is almost universally required? Does it need to be customizable?

[bdarcus]

So we think this is ideally added in a spec addition, and does not require style syntax changes?

[denismaier]

@bwiernik I would think so too.
Perhaps an attribute on cs:style to disable it nevertheless?
If it's indeed already there: shouldn't we formalize this?