Authors’ Names in Bibliographies
Posted by Kevin A. Wilson on 20 Aug 2008 2:50 pm. Filed under Academic.
I want to go on record to say how annoying I find bibliographic entries that use only the author’s first initial and last name. It just looks wrong. Are we really so lazy that we can’t be bothered to write out the author’s first and last name? It’s not like most publications are so hurting for space on the page that they need the few millimeters we save by using a first initial.
I vote we ban this from academic usage. Who’s with me?
On August 20th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Kevin,
I agree with you. You have my vote.
Claude Mariottini
On August 24th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Kevin, I’m sympathetic to your concern here. But if you want to start a publishing company, one of the first things you’ll learn is that letters cost money. The more expensive a book is, the higher the price has to be and/or the lower your profit margin. (And profit margins in publishing in general, never mind academic publishing, are not large to begin with. Some academic books are produced at a loss.) So the reason for omitting as many letters as possible is simply space.
This is also why (IMO) it would be great if we all went to the social science method of citing, even if we do it in footnotes rather than in text. Simple, direct, clear, and takes up less space.
That said, I do lobby for using as much information as is necessary to find the precise bibliography easily. If you have three M. Smith’s, for example, it would be good to include their middle initial (if available).
On August 25th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I do copy processing for a publishers, so I know that each additional page adds to the price of the volume. But I have a hard time believing that using first names in bibliographies will add much to the number of pages (if at all).
Just as an experiment, I pulled out the published form of my dissertation. In looking over the ten page bibliography, I calculated that using only first initials would have saved six lines of text. At about forty-five lines per page, that would result in about a 25% chance of saving an extra page. In all the rest of the pages with footnotes, that chance would have been much smaller, as all the footnotes in the chapter would have had to add up to save a page at the end of the chapter.
Added to this is the fact that most publishers print books using sixteen-page signatures. This is why the number of pages in most books is evenly divisible by sixteen. (That refers to the actual number of pages, not the number of numbered pages.) To cause you to add an additional page, the use of initials would have to force you to add a signature. The chances of that would be 1 in 16. Multiply the 25% chance times 1 in 16 and your getting a really small probability of adding or saving any pages.
In the end, of course, the reason for publishing is primarily to disseminate information. Making money is a secondary concern. If it comes down to a choice between getting out the needed information and making a little extra profit, I would like to think I would go with the information.
Perhaps someone who is more in the business than I am can weigh in, such as Jim at Idle Musings of a Bookseller.
On August 28th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I say add the middle name as well.