Hi Rintze,

I know and have used the IHS style for my own dissertation. The IHS style, otherwise known as the Moody Rules, is a very convoluted and archaic citation system which is difficult to automate. Nevertheless it has been coded very effectively by Emma Reisz at Trinity College, Dublin and it even sorts bibliographical items now.

On the UCD School of History and Archives style sheet they say that they employ a local variant of Chicago adapted to the needs of the IHS. However, the examples they give of how references and citations should be formatted differ significantly from the IHS guidelines and more closely reflect a local variant of Chicago. Indeed in their advice to Endnote users they suggest that the Turabian and American Historical Review citation styles can be used. I'm not familiar with Endnote - or rather I haven't used in almost ten years - but if Endnote can faithfully reproduce those styles than these two differ from the IHS style.

If you want my opinion, and I should probably find who is responsible for the style sheet and ask them, they're genuflecting to Moody and the IHS but asking their students, as is clear from the examples given, to employ a more modern and rational style (which is nonetheless not a little idiosyncratic).

Just to illustrate, the IHS requires footnotes and bibliographical entries for a journal article to be formatted in the following manner.

Journal article:
Footnote
T.W. Moody, 'How to write an article' in Irish Historical Studies, xx, no. 4, (1984), p. 66.
Bibliography in a thesis (most commonly used)
Moody, T.W., 'How to write an article', xx, no. 4, (1984), pp 66-9.
Bibliography for a journal article consisting only of a bibliography of sources (very rarely used)
Moody, T.W. How to write an article. In Irish Historical Studies, xx, no. 4, (1984), pp 66-9.

Please bear in mind that interpretative articles in the IHS normally do not have a bibliography and thus that the bibliographical layout for a thesis is the most relevant one here.

Of note is that for footnotes there is no comma following the article title, there is an "in" before the journal title, there is a comma after the journal title, the volume number is given in roman numerals, a comma follows the publication date and "p." or "pp" is used to indicate the page or page ranges. Also, the "normal" bibliographical entry (i.e. for a thesis submission) mirrors the footnote entry barring the fact that they are sorted alphabetically by surname. Also, IHS normally favours sentence case for article and book titles (although the latter convention is optional). Also, it would appear to be optional whether one adds a month or seasonal qualifier to the publication date - e.g. (March 1984) etc.

The School of History style sheet, however, would require the same reference to formatted in the following manner:

Footnote:
T.W. Moody, 'How to write an article', Irish Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (1984): 66.
Bibliography:
Moody, T.W. 'How to write an article'. Irish Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (1984): 66-9.

The latter example follows Chicago more closely barring the use of single quotation marks and minimal page ranges. Thus, unlike the IHS style, there is a comma after the article title, there is no "in" before the journal title, there is no comma after the journal title, the volume number is given in arabic numerals and a colon follows the publication date if a page or page range is given. Further, the bilbiographical style used is one whose general form is only very rarely used in IHS and never for thesis submissions.

There are many further examples of differences between the IHS style and the school style as indicated on the style sheet. Thus, for book chapters for the IHS the editors precede the title of the book and the term "ed." or "eds" in parentheses follows the name of the editors. However, in school style the title of the book precedes the editors and the term "ed." only - no plural form - without parenthesis comes before the name of the editors.

In truth, I think the whole thing is a bit confused but I think it's best to create a style that closely mirrors the stated departmental requirements as indicated in the examples they provide. If, as may happen, the department clarifies or changes its style I can always update this style.

Added: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/commit/73a24f165d80367118ca749a677b21e420c779b2

Thanks!

[deleted]

If you tell us the differences we can help better. There is a backlog and basically, I'm the only one doing these. (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zc3Sl4JU7Ltu0Q55-OB0QYCJbYiguVXwpc_BzBLLZcA/edit#gid=128551622)

1. Item type: chapter
Current output: asdf....
Expected output: dasf....
...