Individual volume date vs. dates of the full run of volumes

edited February 16, 2021
Hi, is there currently a solution for recording and citing both the date of an individual volume and the dates of the full run of volumes in a multi-volume publication (for a book section entry)?

The reason for asking this is that a full note style (e.g. CMS full note or MHRA) logically requires the dates of the full run of volumes, since the number of volumes is mentioned directly before the place and date of publication, whereas for an author-date style it makes better sense to refer to the individual volume's date rather than a range. Not being able to distinguish between the range and the single date for volumes means manual adjustments when switching between styles, so it would seem like a worthwhile functionality to have, but of course I don't know about the difficulties involved. Relegating the date range to Extra (with the "issued" prefix) doesn't appear to free up the Date field for a variable that could have a different use.

To give an example:

(1) going with individual volume date:

Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (author-date)
Varlık, Mustafa Çetin. 1992. ‘Anadolu Beylikleri’. İn Doğuştan Günümüze Büyük İslâm Tarihi, edited by Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, 8:483–596. İstanbul: Çağ. [works perfectly]

Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (full note)
Mustafa Çetin Varlık, ‘Anadolu Beylikleri’, in Doğuştan Günümüze Büyük İslâm Tarihi, ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, vol. 8, 14 vols (İstanbul: Çağ, 1992), 483–596. [not great as it leads us to think that all 14 volumes were published in a single year]

2) going with a date range for the full run of volumes:

Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (author-date)
Varlık, Mustafa Çetin. 1988–1993. ‘Anadolu Beylikleri’. İn Doğuştan Günümüze Büyük İslâm Tarihi, edited by Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, 8:483–596. İstanbul: Çağ. [not great again as there is a mismatch between the eighth volume and the date range]

Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (full note)
Mustafa Çetin Varlık, ‘Anadolu Beylikleri’, in Doğuştan Günümüze Büyük İslâm Tarihi, ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, vol. 8, 14 vols (İstanbul: Çağ, 1988–1993), 483–596. [works fine]


I don't really come across this type of citation very often, but it does lead to a glitch of sorts, unless I am missing something. Will appreciate any advice (workarounds?) and equally being pointed to a previous relevant discussion if there was one.

PS. Incidentally, when the language of the bibliographic entry is defined as Turkish, the capitalised "In" in the CMS author-date example ends up spelled with a Turkish dotted capital "i", a letter that does not exist in English! :))
  • There's no way to provide separate dates for individual volume and work as a whole, no, but at least the Chicago Manual disagrees with your opinion that citing a single year in the note in such as case is a problem. See 14.118: "If volumes have been published in different years, only the date of the cited volume is given."
  • Thanks for the answer! Citing a single year is not a problem (definitely a better solution for author-date format), only it looks sloppy when you do it using one of the full note styles which tend to mention the number of volumes. My point is simply that the distinction between 14.117 and 14.118 is blurred in Zotero, and switching between the two modes requires manually changing the input for each affected entry. I guess everyone has learned to live with it, ha.
  • I don't see 14.117 and 14.118 as two different modes of citing. You're citing two different things: either the entire work or a specific volume -- that's pretty similar to citing a whole edited volume or a specific section. In both cases you need both items in Zotero separately. You could argue (and many have) that organizing these item types more hierarchically in Zotero would be helpful, but that's pretty separate from the date.

    One thing that we likely will do better in the future is titles of volumes within multivolume books like the 1883-1884 in the Henry James example in 118.

    The other question is if our inclusion of the total number of volumes for citations to individual volumes is actually correct Chicago style. I think there's a good case to be made that it should be omitted.
  • Okay, thanks, I re-read and stand corrected - Chicago indeed encourages citing the specific volume, with no reference to the number or date range of the rest, unless one wants to make a blanket reference to all (which seems unusual to me). Coming from the other side of the ocean I did not think this looks good in bibliography, where you have to infer the existence of multiple volumes from that single digit and colon preceding the page run, but maybe I need to make my peace with Chicago if this is the way to go.
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