Dear TWEED Editing:

I have a question for you, Mistress Tweed. My students informed me recently that MLA requires that bibliographic citations obtained through a database require that the database be included in the citation. So their citations end up looking like this:

DeRogatis, Amy. “Born again is a sexual term”: demons, STDs, and God’s healing sperm.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77.2 (2009): 275-302. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. EBSCO. Web. 5 May 2010.

Is this legit?

—S. M.

Well, TWEEDLE, I think it’s more than legit: your students are covering all of their bases. If a student uses an academic database for full-text content, quoting and paraphrasing from that digital version, then it is appropriate to include the extra information.

Why would this additional location information be necessary? The MLA Handbook explains, “In some databases, typographic features and even the pagination found in print versions may be altered or lost. Sometimes copyrighted third-party materials (illustrations or text) in a print version may have been eliminated because permission for the electronic publication could not be cleared. Web presentations of periodicals may include enhancements, such as hypertextual links, sound recordings, and film clips, that are not present in their print counterparts.” (I retrieved that from 5.6.4, p. 192, of the seventh edition.) Chicago and APA basically concur.

However, the formatting of the example you give needs some tweaking. The example looks indeed like it came right from the citation function within ATLA (the religious studies database) directly, but in this case at least it seems that ATLA has improperly formatted the MLA citation to its own content. This is an example of the limitations of using technology to do one’s sources: however helpful some software may be, it is no substitute for familiarity with documentation paradigms and a keen eye.

Chiefly, the difference between ATLA’s supplied MLA citation (the one that you have replicated in your question) is capitalization style. MLA prefers headline-style capitalization for journal article titles. (What ATLA provides is sentence-style capitalization, a hallmark of APA style, for example.) Here is the citation, modified to better conform to MLA’s stated paradigm:

DeRogatis, Amy. “Born Again is a Sexual Term”: Demons, STDs, and God’s Healing Sperm.” Journal of the American Academy of ReligionATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. EBSCO. Web. 5 May 2010. 77.2 (2009): 275–302.

These online services of course want to be credited, and there is the matter of potentially meaning-bearing differences between print and online versions. On the other hand—and I really shouldn’t say this—if a works-cited entry is complete save for the database information, that’s certainly enough for a reader to locate the material. And that’s the main point of documentation. As a teacher of undergraduates not writing for publication, you can choose how strict you want to be regarding conformity to these protocols.

I guess this younger generation of students and scholars is schooling those of us for whom research used to mean digging for dusty periodicals in the library basement! I wonder how many prominent scholars really do cop to their use of journal databases in their works cited lists.

Now, if a student uses an online database to find source but then actually hunts down the print version of that source in the library, then the extra database information is neither required nor appropriate. Don’t let your overachieving students get too zealous!

~

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Dear TWEED Editing:
My roommate is doing a paper on a film and wants to quote the director from the director’s commentary. Do you have a website recommendation that would explain how one could properly format that in their ‘Works Cited’ section?

–M.G.

Esteemed TWEEDLE,

The answer will depend somewhat on what citation guide you are using—usually Chicago, MLA, or APA. Because you work in the arts, I’m going to assume that APA is not your format and move on to the others.

MLA is probably your citation style if you are using parenthetical citations in the paper, with a works cited list at the end. MLA does not give a specific format for citing director commentary on DVD, but here is an excellent—if I do say so myself—paradigm to follow:

Gondry, Michel and Charlie Kaufman. Audio commentary. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Gondry. Perf. Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, and Kirsten Dunst. Focus Features, 2004. DVD.

(Remember to use a hanging indent for works cited entries!)

To break that down, all participants in the commentary are listed first. If you are citing a specific quote in your paper, then do introduce the speaker of that particular snippet in the body of your paper. The parenthetical citation would look something like this, for instance: (Gondry, 2004).

The director is always indicated after the film title, but I also included what MLA calls “other data that seem pertinent”—here, the marquee performers. You might also want to include the screenwriter or producer, for instance. These would also go between the title and distributor, after the director.

If your film has an original release year that is different from the year of the DVD you’re citing (my example Eternal Sunshine does not), then you would put the original release date—on its own, followed by a period—before the distributor name. Then the date of the DVD version you’re citing goes exactly where the year is in the example above.

Chicago requires different information and treatment:

Gondry, Michel and Charlie Kaufman. “Commentaries.” Disc 2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, collector’s ed. DVD. Directed by Michel Gondry. Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2004.

If you needed to cite this as a footnote, it would look something like this, were Gondry the speaker of the quote extracted:

9. Michel Gondry, “Commentaries,” disc 2, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, collector’s ed, DVD, directed by Michel Gondry (Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2004).

(Remember that the first line of a Chicago footnote is indented!)

Were there an original release date in addition to this DVD release date, that year would be inserted in the parentheses before the city, followed by a semicolon.

Remember, everyone: don’t lose sleep over citation formatting! Documentation systems are only useful insofar as they make finding sources easy. You do want to be as consistent as possible with your citations but ultimately only because that furthers the goal of easy source-finding. When you cannot find the exact paradigm for a particular source type, find the closest model and then adapt to your needs. When in doubt, err on the side of including too much information rather than too little.

Happy citing!

~

TWEED offers services and packages for all your academic editing needs.