Does anyone still care about the name and address of a publisher?

Question

As a follow up question to my previous one, under which circumstances is it reasonable to include the name and/or the address of a publisher in a citation?

In my opinion the most important characteristic of a citation is that it uniquely identifies a given publication and makes it as easy as possible to access it. This, however, is usually already given by title, authors and, if applicable, the title of the collection (proceedings, journal...). If available, a DOI alone would be sufficient for that.

As secondary feature, further details provide more information about the properties of a publication without the need to look them up explicitly. For example, the year is usually very interesting to assess the timeliness of the related work.

Neither the name nor the address of the publisher seems to fall in one of these categories, even though it might be reasonable for example for some exotic books that are otherwise hard to find*. For this reason I usually omit the publisher's name and address in citations, partly to keep them brief, partly since I am not aware who the publisher actually is, partly because others in my area of research (CS) do the same, partly because I am too lazy to put work into something that seems superfluous to me. Sometimes, however, the publishers and their addresses are added during copy editing, so there seem to be at least some people with a different opinion than me.

• Is it considered bad academic practice to omit the publisher and the address?
• What are other advantages or disadvantages?
• Does it depend on the type of the cited publication? Books might be different from articles in journals or conference proceedings.
• Does it depend on the type of the publication I write? In a short paper, brevity might be more important than in a PhD thesis where accuracy is essential. What about a publication list in a CV?
• Does it depend on the area of research? Maybe we computer scientists are just lazy?

_{*Maybe someone wants to drive to Heidelberg to ring the bell at the Springer office just to be told that it a given publication was actually published by SpringerOpen in London...}

Answer 1

It's always important to know the venue for a scientific publication, not just in case you have to track it down, but also in order to understand what sort of review or other vetting process (if any) the publication will have gone through.

For a conference or a journal article, that's the name of the conference or the journal. Thus, I wouldn't typically bother including the publisher---although many such effectively include the publisher in their title (e.g., IEEE Signal Processing, ACS Nano, Nature Methods).

For a book, however, the publisher is the venue, as they decide what merits publication and how to try to ensure validity. Knowing that a book is published by the Oxford University Press means something, just like knowing that a conference is sponsored by the IEEE. It's not a guarantee of correctness any more than journal peer review, but it does imply some basic degree of quality control.

As for address: while it might theoretically be useful for disambiguation, these days most large publishing organizations have multiple sites and are really anchored by their online location rather than their physical location. Thus, I find address completely useless in a citation of recent work and will omit it unless forced by a publisher.

Finally, note that all of this does change if you're talking about works that are not accessible electronically (e.g., much of the literature before the 1970s or so), for which as many hints as possible are useful if one must track it down.

Answer 2

Also: Books (unlike journal/proceedings papers) may not be peer-reviewed. So mentioning the publisher (showing it is a well-knonw publisher) gives a certain credibility to the book. As opposed to self-published books, which nowadays are easy to do.

Answer 3

Journal citations rarely (if ever) include the publisher's information. The reason is simple: journals can change publishers. I have at least one example in mind (cahiers de topologie et géométrie différentielle catégoriques, a math journal). Moreover journal names are usually trademarks, which prevents duplication (and editorial boards from packing up and starting a new journal with the same name when the publisher's bad behavior would require it). So listing the publisher is pointless, because the journal's name (+ other info such as volume, issue...) is sufficient; and even actively bad, because if the journal changes publishers later, people will wonder what they are looking at.

For books, the story is different. GEdgar already said that this allows distinguishing bad publishers from good publishers, though even renowned publishers aren't immune from publishing... subpar texts. Moreover, an edition of a book will always be published by the same publisher, because it's something that has already happened and it's difficult to change the past. If the publisher changes, it's a new edition and will be listed as such.

Answer 4

Is it considered bad academic practice to omit the publisher and the address?

I'd consider omitting the publisher bad practice, because it is sometimes necessary to perform a reverse search to find a paper, e.g., find the publisher, find the proceedings, find the right year, and find the paper.

Does it depend on the type of the cited publication?

I suppose it depends on the infrastructure that's available, in particular, where will manuscripts be archived. When they are archived by the publisher, then identifying the publisher is crucial.