How to Properly Handle Facts of Publication with Zotero

In the Society of Biblical Literature’s adaptation of Chicago style, footnotes citing books have a “facts of publication” section. This section appears in parentheses and includes the work’s

• place of publication,
• publisher, and
• publication date.

In determining what SBL style requires, Chicago’s style authorities have a lower rank than SBL’s. So, where they explicitly speak to a given issue, SBL’s own authorities solely determine SBL style. These authorities include the SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed. ( affiliate disclosure) and the SBL Handbook of Style blog.

For issues that SBL’s own authorities don’t expressly address, however, SBL style fills in the gaps with guidance from the authorities for Chicago style. And when a new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style appears, SBL style automatically relies upon that new edition for such matters.

With the Chicago Manual of Style’s 18th edition ( affiliate disclosure), Chicago style no longer includes a place of publication among its parenthetical publication details (§14.30). But SBL’s style authorities explicitly indicate that you should include the place of publication. So, until one of SBL’s style authorities amends this practice (e.g., the SBL Handbook of Style blog), SBL style continues—in most cases—to require that a volume’s facts of publication include a place of publication.

Place of Publication

Once you’ve identified the proper way to note a given place of publication, add the place of publication in that form to the Place field in your volume’s Zotero record.

Don’t worry that you won’t need this information for all styles (e.g., Chicago 18). Zotero’s style definition files tell it whether to include or omit a place of publication according to the needs of any specific style. So, once you add the place of publication to a Zotero record, you shouldn’t need to remove it or create a duplicate record just to accommodate different requirements for different styles.

When a book lists multiple locations for a single publisher, you should include in your record only the first-listed place of publication.¹

Well-Known and Not Well-Known Places

In general, the main question that determines the form of a place of publication is whether that place is “well known.” For SBL style, a place of publication is “well known” if it appears in the SBL Handbook of Style §6.1.4.1 without any additional state or province abbreviation (e.g., “Grand Rapids”).

Other times, a place of publication isn’t well known (e.g., Eugene, Oregon). Or place names might lead to confusion about the actual place of publication. For instance, “Cambridge” might refer to Cambridge, England (e.g., for Cambridge University Press). Or it might refer to Cambridge, Massachusetts (e.g., for Harvard University Press).

With these lesser-known or more-ambiguous place names,

• if the place is within the United States or Canada, use the format City, Standard two-letter postal abbreviation (e.g., Cambridge, MA or Eugene, OR).
• If the place is outside the United States and Canada,
  • and that place is more prominent than a place with the same name within the United States and Canada, you would use the format City (e.g., Cambridge for Cambridge, England). In such cases, any reference to this place in the SBL Handbook of Style will also appear with the city name only.
  • you will otherwise use as appropriate the format City, local governmental entity, where the local governmental entity is a state, province, or country as appropriate (e.g., Hindhead, Surrey, UK).²

Publisher Names That Include State Names

This said, “when the publisher’s name includes the state name, the [postal] abbreviation [for the state] is not needed.”³ Therefore, you should omit this abbreviation even if you might otherwise have included it.

So, for example, volumes published by University of North Carolina Press should have a place of publication entered simply as Chapel Hill, not Chapel Hill, NC.

Publisher

For the proper way to represent a given publisher’s name, see the SBL Handbook of Style §6.1.4.1. Of course, if a given publisher’s name has changed since SBL published this edition of the handbook, you’ll use the new version of the publisher’s name.

Once you identify the proper form for a publisher’s name, add that name in that form to the Publisher field in your volume’s Zotero record. Of course, not all publishers’ names appear in the SBL Handbook of Style. So, for those that don’t, some additional principles might help you add other names to your Zotero database in the proper form.

Words to Omit

In publishers’ names, you should generally omit an initial “The”, as well as abbreviations and terms like “Co.”, “Inc.”, “Press,” “Publishing Co.,” and “Verlag”.⁴

Presses sometimes take their names from people. With some exceptions, such presses typically go by the individual’s last name only (e.g., Eerdmans, Nelson) or last name and associative particle only (e.g., de Gruyter).⁵ Press names that refer to descendants of an individual use the possessive of the progenitor’s surname (e.g., Scribner's Sons).⁶

Words to Normalize

In a publisher’s name, you should represent “and” with an ampersand (e.g., Herder & Herder).⁷

If a work is published by a “Fortress” press, note also that the proper form for this press’s name is

• Augsburg Fortress if the publication place is Minneapolis and
• Fortress if the publication place is Philadelphia.⁸

Words to Include

Although you would generally omit “Co.” or “Company,” you would retain “and Company” as & Company.

For university and InterVarsity presses, you always retain the word “Press” as part of the publisher name. Doing so helps distinguish between something published by a university or InterVarsity directly rather than by the university or InterVarsity press.

Also, presses named after historical figures who did not found the press typically have the names of those figures given in full (e.g., “John Knox”). But “T&T Clark” is also generally given as such and not shortened simply to “Clark”.

Finally, some publishers may print volumes both under their general name and under a specific “Academic” imprint. You should include this distinction in your Zotero records and, for instance, distinguish between a volume published by InterVarsity Press and one published by InterVarsity Press Academic.⁹

Multiple Publishers in Multiple Locations

When a volume has multiple publishers in multiple locations, your citation should include the first-listed place and publisher, then the second-listed place and publisher.¹⁰

So, for example, you might have a citation like

Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, trans. W. B. Hillis, ILPP (New York: Harcort, Brace, & Company; London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Company, 1925).

In such situations, you have two options for how you enter this combination of publishers and places in your Zotero record.

Hijack the Place or Publisher Field for Additional Information

One approach might be to hijack Zotero’s Place or Publisher fields and include further information there.

For instance, you might enter in the Place field the place of publication you want to list first. Then, in the Publisher field, you might enter

1. the name of the publisher associated with the location in the Place field,
2. a semi-colon (;),
3. the name of the place associated with the second publisher,
4. a colon (:), and
5. the name of the second publisher.

Zotero will simply treat everything in the Publisher field as one long string of text. So, as long as that’s all you need Zotero to do with that information, this arrangement should work fine.

On the other hand, as soon as you need Zotero to handle this information in some other way, it won’t be able to do so. You’ll need to resort to manually editing either your Zotero records or the citations Zotero produces.

Use the Extra Field

The CSL specification is currently at version 1.0.2. CSL’s next version (1.1) doesn’t have an estimated arrival time at present.11 But when it does come out, it will include more robust ways of handling multiple publishers for a single volume.¹¹

Until then, there isn’t a great way to fully future-proof your data entry for co-published volumes. So, you might end up needing to adjust your Zotero records however you enter the data. But another option is to use the Extra field that appears toward the bottom of each item’s information pane. In this field, you can enter values for other fields that Citation Style Language (CSL) supports but that Zotero’s user interface doesn’t. Two are particularly pertinent here— original-publisher and original-publisher-place.

If a volume is co-published by two presses in two different locations, each publisher is just as “original” as the other. But if you identify to Zotero one publisher and place as the original-publisher and original-publisher-place, then Zotero can manipulate their information properly, just as it can for your entries in the Place and Publisher fields.

For instance, your Extra field might include lines like

original-publisher-place: London
original-publisher: Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Company

And your Place and Publisher fields might include the place and publisher that you decide to list second.

This said, there’s presently a bug in Zotero’s SBL style definition. So in your bibliography, you’ll get the facts of publication listed as “London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Company . New York: Harcort, Brace, & Company, 1925.” rather than “London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Company ; New York: Harcort, Brace, & Company, 1925.”¹²

Discussion of a pull request to address this issue surfaced some of these other points about the evolution of the CSL specification and the inability of even this arrangement to handle more than two publishers for a record.14 So, this adjustment won’t be getting accepted into the main SBL style specification.

That said, you can install a fork of the official style that handles the information like I describe here. If you’d like to address co-published volumes in this way, drop your email address in the form below, and I’ll send that style your way.

Publication Date

In Zotero’s Date field, enter the four-digit year of your volume’s publication. Or if your record is for a multi-volume work published over several years, you can accommodate that information between Zotero’s Date and Extra fields.

Conclusion

Different volumes’ facts of publication present different questions and challenges. But Zotero allows you to “set it and forget it.” Once you get a volume’s information into your database properly, it will stay correct. And when you need to do the same kind of thing for a different volume, you’ll have a ready example for how you entered the information previously.