Style Error: SBL 2nd Ed. (Full Note), Book Review

Hi all,

I've done my best to read through prior posts on this and haven't found an answer.

When I use the "Reviewed Author" field, I get perfectly fine results in the Chicago styles. E.g.:

    Joseph Lam, review of Sin: A History, by Gary A. Anderson, Review of Biblical Literature, 2010.
    Lam, Joseph. Review of Sin: A History, by Gary A. Anderson. Review of Biblical Literature, 2010.

Using the SBL style (my preference for the dissertation I'm writing) I get:

    Joseph Lam, “Sin: A History,” by Gary A. Anderson, RBL (2010).
    Lam, Joseph. “Sin: A History.” RBL (2010).

It's not prefixing "Review of" (nor getting the italics and quotation marks right).

Poking around in the style editor, I see for the Chicago style:
<macro name="title-note">
[...]
<else-if variable="reviewed-author">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" prefix="review of "/>

and
<macro name="title">
<choose>
...
<else-if variable="reviewed-author">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text variable="title" font-style="italic" prefix="Review of "/>
<names variable="reviewed-author">
<label form="verb-short" text-case="lowercase" suffix=" "/>
<name and="text" delimiter=", "/>
</names>
</group>


It seems to me that something like that is missing from the SBL style. My programming abilities are haphazard-amateur at best. I added the above else-ifs in the style editor for the SBL style, and started getting the following output:

    Joseph Lam, review of Sin: A History, by Gary A. Anderson, RBL (2010).
    Lam, Joseph. Review of Sin: A History, by Gary A. Anderson. RBL (2010).

This seems consistent with the SBL Style Guide p. 93 Section 6.3.4 Book Reviews which gives these examples:

    8. Howard M. Teeple, review of Introduction to the New Testament, by André Robert and André Feuillet, JBR 34 (1966): 368–70.
    21. Teeple, review of Introduction to the New Testament (by Robert and Feuillet), 369.
    Teeple, Howard M. Review of Introduction to the New Testament, by André Robert and André Feuillet. JBR 34 (1966): 368–70.

(I don't know how to fix subsequent citations without reading up on it. Chicago and SBL seem to omit "review of" on subsequent citations.)

Is it possible to have the style in the repository updated to fix this?
  • @andyroo, courtesy of @"John Percival" with @adamsmith, this should be fixed as of the end of August. If you pull in the current version of the SBL style from the repository, you should see the SBL style handling book review citations properly. For details, see here.
  • @dstark that's fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to reply to me here.

    I just read through the github conversation you linked to. You, Sebastian, 'JohnHP', and all those working on these fixes get a huge amount of gratitude from me. I appreciate that implementing "little fixes" like these actually require a lot of thinking and testing.
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