Style Question: Chicago (including Turabian and SBL)

When including a citation as part of a sentence in a note, note-bibliography Chicago styles should eliminate a final period and use a comma after the citation instead (cf. CMS, 16th ed., 14.50). Thus, the proper formatting should be:

John Doe, The Book, regards this position as faulty.

As far as I can tell, however, the current note-bibliography Chicago versions and their derivatives (including Turabian and SBL) still include a period at the end of the citation, even if one adds the comma (or other punctuation; e.g., semicolon, closing parenthesis) in the "suffix" field of the Add/Edit Citation dialog box. Thus, the current output is:

John Doe, The Book,. regards this position as faulty.

So far, I have only been able to remove the period by directly editing the text of each citation individually (Add/Edit Citation > Show Editor). If anyone has a workaround for this issue, it would be much appreciated! :)

Gratefully,
David
  • You should create and write the entire note with the Zotero Word plugin, using the prefix and suffix fields for anything that precedes and follows a citation.
    In your example, e.g., you should put
    ", regards this position as faulty". into the suffix field.
  • You know, I should have thought of this myself. ;) In use cases where the whole rest of the note may be even up to a couple paragraphs long, there's no need to include the whole rest of the note in the suffix box—just enough to come to a period. Until your suggestion, I also hadn't thought to try the rich text markup in the suffix box either (e.g., in case the rest of the sentence needs to include some italics), but that should solve that part of this issue for a number of other, more complicated situations than the example I provided.

    So, while it might be more convenient in some ways to have Zotero automatically eliminate the period if necessary (as I think it did at one point, did it not?), as you've pointed out, this issue is more one of mechanics than of correctness, and I've corrected the thread title accordingly.

    Thanks so much for the help with this (for me) pesky issue! :)
  • I don't think Zotero did this, no - there is a long thread on this that's two years old or so.
    Auto removing periods etc. is always a bit of a tricky issue (I think, e.g. "ibid.," is sometimes used) so I'm not sure if that's going to happen.
  • Okay. I think the thread you mentioned is probably one of the ones I read before submitting my post. It must just have been my memory playing tricks with me. :-P

    Thanks, again, for your help.

    Gratefully,
    David
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