Suggested change to MLA 8: add day of month for magazine articles

jerryplotnick

The current csl file for Modern Language Association 8th Edition does not make any distinction between journal articles and magazine articles and so does not include the day of month for bibliographic entries of magazine articles.

Although the new MLA guidelines are somewhat open-ended on dates (they advise using whatever appears on the publication but provide users with latitude), the longstanding practice of providing full dates for magazine articles, e.g., 3 May 2017, hasn't changed. The current csl file will output May 2017.

Journal articles are trickier. MLA 8 would appear to recommend inclusion of at least the month along with the year where available, but in practice I find that most bibliographies still provide just the year, while Save to Zotero almost always comes up with a month.

In any event, feel free to borrow the following code in the current MLA csl file. I provide two versions. The former includes month with year for journal articles and so might be safer. The latter, my own preference, uses year only for journals. (Ideally, I would like include season when, e.g., I write Spring 2017 into the year field, but the word Spring gets included only if I also specify in the csl that the month be included.)

Version 1 (include day month year for magazine articles; include month year for journal articles):

<macro name="publication-date">
<choose>
<if type="book chapter paper-conference motion_picture" match="any">
<date variable="issued" form="numeric" date-parts="year"/>
</if>
<else-if type="article-journal">
<date variable="issued" form="text" date-parts="year-month"/>
</else-if>
<else-if type="article-magazine">
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="day" suffix=" " range-delimiter="-"/>
<date-part name="month" form="short" suffix=" "/>
<date-part name="year" range-delimiter="/"/>
</date>
</else-if>
<else-if type="speech" match="none">
<date variable="issued" form="text"/>
</else-if>
</choose>
</macro>

Version 2 (include day month year for magazine articles; include year for journal articles):

<macro name="publication-date">
<choose>
<if type="book chapter paper-conference motion_picture" match="any">
<date variable="issued" form="numeric" date-parts="year"/>
</if>
<else-if type="article-journal">
<date variable="issued" form="text" date-parts="year"/>
</else-if>
<else-if type="article-magazine">
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="day" suffix=" " range-delimiter="-"/>
<date-part name="month" form="short" suffix=" "/>
<date-part name="year" range-delimiter="/"/>
</date>
</else-if>
<else-if type="speech" match="none">
<date variable="issued" form="text"/>
</else-if>
</choose>
</macro>

FYI, here is what now appears in the csl file:

<macro name="publication-date">
<choose>
<if type="book chapter paper-conference motion_picture" match="any">
<date variable="issued" form="numeric" date-parts="year"/>
</if>
<else-if type="article-journal article-magazine" match="any">
<date variable="issued" form="text" date-parts="year-month"/>
</else-if>
<else-if type="speech" match="none">
<date variable="issued" form="text"/>
</else-if>
</choose>
</macro>