Please Send Help on Citations

At Steve’s request I have agreed to help prepare a guidance “page” on how to cite Chinese philosophy-related texts (classical and post-classical), and how to use the citations you see.  But I don’t know much about that, so please send help!

The page would be for complete novices and professional scholars, covering alternate systems and giving a few pros and cons (not conclusions).  Hopefully the page would also be a resource for people trying to figure out how to use mysterious citation numbers they see.  To make all systems work better.

Mostly what I can do is prepare a kind of structure for a guidance page, to be filled in by people who know what they’re talking about.

For any text where there is no agreed mode of fine-grained edition-independent citation, I’ll want to include a short list of the best options, best editions (even if these are only translations or web pages).  For example, it looks like Bryan’s Mengzi is worth special mention because it has numbers for units smaller than chapters.  NB: for almost every text, I have no clue what to list.

One kind of issue would be e.g. whether to say 1A7 or 1a7 or 1A/7 or whatever; but most important issue is how to find some kind of numbers for e.g. the Liji and which ones to use.

Please send me all information and ideas you would like to see reflected in such a guidance page; or post it here below or under the May 29 post.   My email is haines followed by my initial w (for William) and then 88, at gmail.

Based on what I get, I’ll draft what little I can and circulate it among the people who have sent me something or commented on one of the relevant threads here, and anyone who tells me they want to receive the draft, and anyone else I’m told to send it to.

After something is posted, ideally it would receive constant revision.

3 thoughts on “Please Send Help on Citations

  1. I would very much like to see information about the differences between the Harvard-Yenching and ICS versions of the Zhuangzi. They seem to differ very subtly. But of course, I have only ever read the Zhuangzi in translation and on ctext.org, and with electronic text search, the usefulness of the extensive Harvard-Yenching index seems highly limited to me in the first place! So my primary question–unfortunately, I cannot offer any sort of expertise–is to inquire about the actual difference between the H-Y and the ICS.

  2. Sometimes the editor of an anthology will send guidelines about citations to the contributors.

    Such notes would be very helpful information for me in this project. My email address is in the main post above.

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