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Dealing with a new edition of a well known architect's tome from the 1950s, amending and adding citations for sources neglected in the original edition. The author takes liberally from a section of this report to the National Resources Board in 1937:

1. Bernhard J. Stern, “Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations,” Report of the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee in Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implication of New Inventions (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1937), 52, 53.

It must be formatted in Chicago style. My question is whether the portion of "Report of the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee" should be included, and should it be capitalized or in italics or parentheses? The author only cites from the section written by Stern, section IV "Resistances to the Adoption...." so should "section IV" be added, and in Arabic or Roman numerals?

Here's a link to the document in Google Books and at the Internet Archive. Thank you for any input.

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    It seems unlikely that a future reader would complain about having too much detail to try and track down a citation from roughly a century ago (now, and possibly much more than a century to go for some future reader).
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Apr 27, 2023 at 15:18
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    I continue to not understand why those finding them forced to use APA/Chicago/... style are such adherents to the style that they forget the first rule of citations: Make it possible for the reader to find the referenced object. That is the prime directive, everything else is subordinate. Commented Apr 27, 2023 at 19:35

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This is a part of a report of a US executive agency. Chicago style has some specific rules for citing US government reports, but also recognizes a role for "discretion and common sense" in the selection of elements, given that public documents of this kind are not uniform.

The fifteenth edition I have on my desk gives an example (17.317):

Ralph I. Straus, Expanding Private Investment for Free World Economic Growth, special report prepared at the request of the Department of State, April 1959, 12.

(This is using the "note" style as opposed to "bibliography", as are other examples below.)

The commissioning agency itself might be given as author in other cases. This shows a pattern for an executive branch document with an identifiable human author, associated with some department.

Treating the chapter by Stein as a "contribution to a multiauthor book" (17.69), for which the canonical pattern is:

Anne Carr and Douglas J. Schuurman, "Religion and Feminism: A Reformist Christian Analysis," in Religion, Feminism, and the Family, ed. Anne Carr and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 11-32.

we might obtain:

Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations," in Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implication of New Inventions, report prepared for the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1937), 39-66.

The publisher can be shortened to "GPO" if you like. It can be omitted if there is other identifying information, such as a congressional report series number which makes it obvious that this is a government publication, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

For some specific queries raised -

  1. The original form "Report ... in Technological Trends ..." does not seem right, since the Trends document is the report. And since Technological Trends ... is the book title, it gets the italic treatment; the fact that this was a report to a specific agency is additional data.

  2. Including the "report of" part means that you are giving an (institutional) author for the book itself. A key principle is (17.293) that you should include "the elements needed to find the work in a library catalog," which may include the originating executive department, if that's listed as the author. Checking around, it looks like several catalogs do just that, although it's not really too hard these days to find the book given just the title. I would suggest keeping it in order to provide the extra breadcrumb, and some context for the type of publication that this is.

  3. The Committee and its Subcommittee get capitals because these are proper nouns. But "report" doesn't because it's descriptive of the fact that this is a report.

  4. If you wish to include the section number, note that this is Section IV of Part One, and there is another Section IV later, so it's not right to say it is just Section IV. If you give the page range then this information is redundant - just having the page information is probably the preferred style, judging from other examples.

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  • Thorough! I'd only add that the source has on its title page: "report of the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee." Is the reworded "report prepared for the Subcommittee on Technology..." as you've suggested preferable? I'm also citing a specific page and inclined towards: Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations," in Technological Trends and National Policy, Including the Social Implication of New Inventions, report of the Subcommittee on Technology to the National Resources Committee (Washington, DC: US GPO, June 1937), 52, 53. Commented Apr 27, 2023 at 21:37
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    Your wording seems reasonable to me
    – alexg
    Commented Apr 28, 2023 at 6:35

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