Thursday, August 18, 2005

Citations are my bane

Well despite the best of intentions I did not finish the cotton paper today. I typed up the corrections and reformatted the text. But, Central Asian Survey uses a real wierd citation system I have never seen before. I had written the paper using my usual system thinking that it would be easy to convert. It has not been. I have been going through each of my 84 citations and altering them to fit the journal's system. Actually they have more than one system. Journals from the West are to be cited in one way and those from Russia and other former Soviet states and Eastern Europe another. About 75 of my citations are from Russian language sources, but the other ten are Amercian and German. So I have to make sure I don't cite them like the others. I am going to finish it tommorrow I hope. At anyrate, it will still be almost a month early.

2 comments:

Frank said...

That systems does sound extremely odd. Must have been a particularly schizophrenic committee decision or something.

J. Otto Pohl said...

I think the West citations, number than year are standard in the UK where the journal is based. While the year than number is used in Russia. But, there is no reason that the Russian sources can not be cited in western literature using number then year. The citation system has some other difficulties as well. For instance using the first footnote number to cite a source to identify it later on rather than using the publication year or a shortened title.