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December 6th, 2025 (Permalink)

How to Lie With Notes 3¹: Anatomy of a Citation

As a reader of research, once you understand the purposes of notes and the cryptic abbreviations used, the structure of the note itself will be self-explanatory. Exactly how a note is formatted is unimportant as long as sufficient information is included to allow you to identify the source cited and consult it.

There are a few common citation styles for scholarly publications, such as those of the Modern Language Association, the American Psychological Association, and the University of Chicago. There are also specialized styles for some disciplines, and publications or publishers may have their own styles. I won't discuss any of these in detail because the differences between them are unimportant to the reader or researcher². Most style choices are arbitrary, like which side of the road you drive on, and will get you where you want to go. So, if you're the writer choose one and stick to it, or if you're writing for a specific publication, find out what style it uses and follow that.

As a reader or researcher, all that you need to know is how to use a citation to check a source, and to do that you need the following information:

Author's or authors' full name(s): There are many writers with the same last name, such as Stephen King, Florence King, Laurie King, et al. So, a first name should be included except for some rare writers known by a single name, such as Plato, Voltaire, Trevanian, et al. If first and last names are not enough to distinguish two writers, then a middle name or initial is needed. For instance, there were two writers of detective stories named John MacDonald: John Dann MacDonald―usually known by his middle initial―and John Ross Macdonald―who dropped the "John" later and became known as just Ross Macdonald³.
The publication's full title: The full title of the work cited is needed for the same reason as for the author's full name: there may be more than one work with the same title. There may even be more than one book with a seemingly unusual title. For instance, there are at least three books entitled The Third Bullet by three different authors: John Dickson Carr⁴, Stephen Hunter⁵, and Arnold C. Stream⁶. The full title of Carr's book is The Third Bullet and Other Stories, so that should be included in the citation to distinguish it from the other two books. If the book has a subtitle, it can be included to distinguish it from others. In some cases, the title alone is not enough to differentiate two or more works, in which case the authors' names or date of publication will have to do the job. For example, Hunter's and Stream's books have the same full title and no subtitles⁷.
If the work is an article published in a magazine, journal, or newspaper, then the title of the article itself should be included along with the full title of the periodical. As with books, there are often multiple periodicals with the same title. In particular, there are many newspapers called "The Times", "The Herald", "The Tribune", etc., so newspapers are usually differentiated by their place of publication. For instance, there are the London Times, New York Times, and Washington Times. In some cases, the name of the city is incorporated into the title, as in The New York Times, but in other cases it is not, as in The Times of London.
The date of publication: There are two reasons to include the date a work is published in a citation:
1. To make it possible to find the specific edition of a book or the particular issue of a periodical. For books, only the year of publication is usually needed, since it would be unusual for more than one edition to appear in a year. For periodicals, the information needed is determined by their frequency of publication. For example, for monthly magazines, the month and year should be cited; for daily newspapers, the full date should be included. Such information is needed to track down the source cited; there's nothing more frustrating than trying to find an article in a periodical for which only the year of publication is given.
2. Knowing when a work is published is often useful information even if you never consult the work itself. For instance, an old work might be too out-of-date to be useful, or a very recent work might suffer from current faddish biases and parochialism that an older work would lack. In both cases, the date of publication might lead you to look for a different source.
Edition number: For books that go through multiple editions, the edition number may be needed. Some books, such as textbooks, may change significantly from edition to edition⁸, so it's important to know which edition is cited; others, such as novels, may not change significantly between editions, especially if the author is dead. When in doubt, if there is an edition number it should be cited.
Page number(s): The only thing as frustrating as trying to track down a newspaper article when you lack a day of publication is looking for something in a large book when you don't have a page number. The main purpose of a note is to make it possible for the reader to check quotes or references that supposedly confirm claims, and failing to give sufficient information to do so defeats that purpose.

That's it. That is all that's needed in a citation. Many notes, as well as citation styles, include the name of the publisher and the place of publication, but I've never found these useful. Theoretically, if you want to get hold of a book you could contact the publisher directly, but who does that nowadays? This information was perhaps useful in the past, but today you can easily find almost any published book from an online bookseller. The place of publication is even less likely to be of value than the publisher's name; who needs to know that a book was published in Evanston, Illinois? For these reasons, I suggest omitting this information from citations, which would save some space at the foot of the page; that it continues to be recommended by style guides is, I suspect, the result of scholarly inertia.

Notes:

↑ Previous entries in this series:
1. Introduction, 10/23/2025
2. Latin Abbreviations, 11/13/2025
↑ For a side-by-side comparison of the three styles, see: " Side by Side Comparison Chart―APA, Chicago, and MLA", Stonehill College, 7/2018.
↑ John D. MacDonald was the author's real name; (John) Ross Macdonald was a pseudonym for Kenneth Millar. In addition to the middle initial and middle name, the two authors spelled their common last name differently: John D. with a capital "D" and Ross with a lowercase "d". See: "John D. MacDonald", Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed: 12/6/2025 and "Ross Macdonald", Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed: 12/6/2025.
↑ John Dickson Carr, The Third Bullet and Other Stories (1954).
↑ Stephen Hunter, The Third Bullet (2013).
↑ Arnold C. Stream, The Third Bullet (1986).
↑ However, Hunter's book is referred to as "A Bob Lee Swagger Novel" and, though I'm unsure whether that counts as a subtitle, it could be used to distinguish it from Stream's book.
↑ However, one of the dirty little secrets of textbook publishing is that many such books are reprinted in new editions every few years with the only significant changes in the exercises. This is done to try to undercut the resale market in texts and to defeat students trying to cheat on exercises. Also, obviously, it makes a lot of money for the publisher.

December 1st, 2025 (Permalink)

Book Review: An Over-Abundance of Caution

Quote: "…[T]he long list of claims, the filibuster of excuses about why schools could not open that were made repeatedly by politicians, union leaders, influencers, the media, and health authorities―and others in the medical field who had no expertise on viral transmission or mitigation, but whom journalists treated as experts anyway―was a systematic fiction. Even more than two years later, in the fall of 2022, after the reckoning of abysmal academic outcomes from school closures became an acceptable admission in polite society, many epidemiologists, other public health professionals, and pundits simply framed this as the unfortunate consequence of a wrenching decision between saving lives from COVID or harming kids by keeping them out of school. But this damned if you do, damned if you don't narrative was a false binary, representing a fundamental misunderstanding about the lack of benefit of school closures. Much of Europe, and many areas of the US where schools were kept open the longest in aggregate, suffered no greater numbers of cases, or subsequent morbidity and mortality, than areas where schools were closed the longest."¹

Title: An Abundance of Caution

Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

Author: David Zweig

Date: 2025

Summary: This book tells the story of only one aspect of the coronavirus pandemic, namely, the effect of the virus on children and the misguided efforts to protect them by closing schools.

Review: There will be another pandemic, probably sooner than expected, and little has been done to prepare for it. The first step in doing so is to review what happened, and especially what was done wrong, during the last one. We probably won't make exactly the same mistakes again since it may be an influenza virus, or some other kind of virus, rather than a coronavirus, that causes the next one. But if we don't understand how those mistakes came about, new mistakes will be made in the same old ways.

I was already familiar with much that Zweig covers in this book, and even wrote about some of it at the time², but one thing still surprised me: how early in the pandemic the basic facts about the coronavirus and its effects were known. This was a triumph for the science of epidemiology, but a miserable failure of journalists and public health authorities to communicate those facts to the public. In this book, Zweig exposes that failure by thoroughly documenting what was known about the coronavirus and when, as opposed to what was said about it by politicians and reporters. He explains:

…[N]early all of the evidence I present in this book was known in real time or in advance. The single most important myth that this book seeks to debunk is the notion that various interventions―most specifically related to schools and kids―were reasonable of even necessary to be employed because "we didn't know" at the time about their lack of benefit, or the relatively benign course for children from the virus. On the other side of the coin, it was similarly false to say "we didn't know" about the harms that would accrue from these largely ineffective interventions.³

Throughout the pandemic, we were often told to "follow the science", yet government bureaucrats and journalists repeatedly failed to tell us where the science was headed. As a result, ineffective and harmful measures, such as school closings, were taken.

Here, based on this book and my own research, and illustrated with some quotes from the book under review, are what I think were the primary sources of error during the pandemic:

Computer Modelling
Models are a useful and necessary part of epidemiology; they're one tool scientists use to try to predict what will happen. But the Achilles' heel of models is that they are always based on sets of statistical assumptions, which are then plugged into mathematical formulas that spit out results or ranges of results. The formula itself might be valid, but if you insert the wrong numbers then you get the wrong result. Researchers tartly call this problem "garbage in, garbage out."⁴
Public Health Bureaucrats
…[F]or journalists at prestigious outlets, the majority of whom are politically aligned with those in the public health establishment, investigating or critiquing the policies espoused by the people on their team was tantamount to helping the enemy. Many in public health shared with their peers in the media this instinct against tolerating any public dissent with the tribe.⁵
Junk Journalism
Since much of the public relies on the media for information about policies and practices, journalists have an epistemic duty to investigate on their own or to press the experts they are quoting for the evidence behind their claims. …[I]n many circumstances neither of these functions were performed. Succinctly: there was an astonishing lack of curiosity by professionals whose job is to be curious. Which raises the question: Why is it that journalists, and the broader educated elite traditionally, or at least ideally, bring great skepticism to the claims made by and the motives of every major institution in society, from religion to big business to government, yet when it came to the pandemic policies espoused by Fauci, the CDC, and the public health establishment…in so many instances their skepticism vanished?⁶

I believe this is the first time I've recommended a book as "Recommended Reading", since usually I just recommend articles and essays, but that shows just how important this book is. Zweig obviously put an enormous amount of time and energy into it, and I think that the book deserves at least a little of our own effort in return.

Nitpicking: This is an important book but not a perfect one; of course, no book is. One of Zweig's greatest strengths is, perhaps, his greatest weakness, namely, his thoroughness. Zweig marshalls so much evidence in favor of his thesis that it's overkill―not in the sense that it undermines his own argument, but that it's just too much. Zweig makes his point seven ways to Sunday, when six would have sufficed. If you're not convinced by the arsenal of evidence that Zweig presents here, then nothing will convince you; whereas, if you're as convinced as I am, the excess can become tedious⁷.

I'm not suggesting that you use its length as an excuse not to read it, rather that you don't need to read the whole thing to get its benefits. In particular, there are three sections in the book labelled "Deep Dives":

Peanuts, Lemons, and Evidence-Based Medicine
This section is a history of some previous medical mistakes; specifically, about peanut allergies, scurvy, and in what position babies should sleep. I didn't need any convincing that medical experts are fallible, but I still found the section fascinating.
"Basic Physics"―Mitigation Misinformation, and the Case of HEPA Filters
This section is primarily a debunking of the unfounded claim, made repeatedly by the teachers' unions, that schools shouldn't open until they had expensive ventilation systems using HEPA filters, which would have taken months if not years to implement. I found this section less interesting than the previous one.
Harms of School Closures
Unlike the previous two "deep dives", this one is directly related to the main thesis of the book. However, of all the policies adopted during the pandemic, this is the only one that seems to be now widely admitted to have been both unnecessary and harmful―see the quote at the beginning of this review. So, if you're already convinced that closing schools harmed children, you might just as well skip this section, which makes terribly depressing reading. In contrast, all those politicians and teachers' union officials who pushed for school closings and resisted their reopening should be forced to read it.

I've nitpicked the book above, not because I want to discourage you from reading it, but because I want to encourage you. There is an almost overwhelming amount of important information in this volume, and I don't want you to use that as an excuse to avoid it. In addition, the emotions that the book may evoke―the regret, anger, even guilt―may also at times feel overwhelming. But we need to face the facts, as unpleasant as they may be, about what went wrong during the last pandemic if we're not to go through an even worse future one. If you should open the book and find yourself feeling overwhelmed, keep in mind that you can skip the "Deep Dives" without losing track of the book's main thread.

Recommendation: Highly recommended, but with the proviso that you needn't read the whole thing.