Labels in Citations
Some bibliographic reference lists are unnumbered, some are bulleted lists, some have a
counting number before each reference, and some have special symbols or author-descriptive labels (such as [Piez 2009]) constructed according to “Harvard
rules” or other semantic numbering system. The first decision a publisher or
archive needs to make is whether to capture such numbers using <label> or whether all such designators are generated for display or
print. A repository archive may choose to preserve all numbers; a publisher may choose to generate them.
Assuming numbers will be preserved, the next decision concerns punctuation and
spacing. It is possible to preserve all punctuation and
spacing “3.” or
“[Lapeyre-Usdin 2009]” or to preserve just the significant portion of
the label (the numeral or the name-year) and not preserve the spacing or punctuation: “3” or
“Lapeyre-Usdin 2009”. The following
samples preserve the label punctuation (and could also preserve label spacing):
Usually the label applies to the reference (<ref>). Citations (<element-citation> or <mixed-citation>) are
typically only numbered when multiple citations occur within a single reference. In such
cases, the reference is typically numbered in series with the other, single references,
and the citations are numbered using a different numbering scheme. For example, a
reference numbered <label>4.</label> could have citations
inside it labeled
“a.”,
“b.”,
“c.”
or “[Gaylord 2005]”,
“[Beck 2006]”,
“[Usdin 2009]”.