Why are articles and books formatted differently in many citation styles? Proceedings, websites, theses and other works are also formatted in their own way.
It really looks very inconsistent and makes the bibliography harder to read. I know that this is a rather minor problem, but it would also not be too hard to fix it.
As an example, many citation styles look like this:
Book:
First Last. Title of the Work. Vol. 123. Series Name 456. Publisher Name, 2022
Article:
First Last. “Title of the Work”. In: Journal Name 123.456 (2022)
Differences
Title in quotes / italics and journal name in italics.
This means, one cannot just look for the italic words and have the title of the publication.
Other differences
- Publisher is printed or not
- Year is in parentheses or not
- Formatting of the volume and number
You might argue that the publisher has a different importance for articles and books, but this does not explain the other inconsistencies.
Possible "Reasons" I can think of
- Historical Reasons, but why is this not yet changed?
- As a reader I am supposed to immediately tell whether this is an article or a book. But what do I do with this information?
Considered Citation Styles
The citation above is generated using BibLaTeX with the bibstyle=numeric. Considering other common citation styles in LaTeX only one does the formatting of book/article title consistently.
The described behavior is however relatively independent from the citation style, as it occurs in APA, MLA, Chicago, ...
