This journey started innocently enough. It started with a simple question.

Ruth set me off (thank you, Ruth). She emailed to ask what Ivi means, in a footnote. I don’t know – I didn’t know.

She said that she knows Ibid. (which she suggested means: same page in the same source as the last source/footnote) and she knows Op. cit. (full details given in an earlier footnote), but she hadn’t come across Ivi before. She asked if it means the same source as in the last footnote, but on a different page?

It was important to know. Ruth had a student who wanted to use a quotation she had found in an academic paper. This makes it a secondary reference or indirect source, a quotation of a quotation. The student needed to know the author of the original quotation as well as the author of the paper in which she had found the quote. The student wanted to write something like,

Ivi suggests that Kennedy believed “bla bla bla bla” (qtd. in MS).

But who – or what, and where – is Ivi?  That’s who MS gives us, in the footnote: “²² Ivi 27.”

Ruth had given me the title of the paper, so that would be a good place to start. But before going there (as detailed in Part 2), I paused for a moment. Ruth was, as far as I knew, right. Ibid. means in the same place, and “Op. cit. name page” means in the work (already) cited. Thus, “Newton, op. cit., 321” would refer to page 321 of Newton’s work (which would have been cited in full, earlier in the paper).   What’s more, I had thought that Op. cit was rarely used any more. Certainly, it is no longer used in Chicago/Turabian style, that much I thought I knew. About which, more later.

Back to Ibid. (and Ivi too): surely the way to indicate a different page in the work just cited is Ibid. 22 (or whatever the page number should be)?

Maybe not. EndNote (produced by Thomson Reuters) is regarded as highly authoritative.  On their Community site I found a post Right Use of ibidem and idem, once and for all.

In this post, flav2isback assertively suggests that ibidem or ibid. can be used only if the citation refers to the same page in the same work. If the source cited is the same work but a different page, the correct indication (we are told) is “idem, 321” – or alternatively “id, 321.” Gulp. I  felt  out of my depth already – especially as comments by members of the EndNote Community suggested that flav2isback was wrong.  Some said that it IS acceptable (at least in Chicago/Turabian) to use ibid. 321 to mean same source but a different page…

It could be, of course, a matter of different styles having different usages – flavis2back might not be using Chicago/Turabian – so this post might not be helpful at all.

More immediately, there has been no mention of Ivi.  Searches for [Ivi], as a single word and in combination with ibid and/or ibidem and/or op cit proved fruitless. R.M. Ritter, whose Oxford Style Manual is my vade mecum where Latin terms and abbreviations are concerned, makes no mention of Ivi.  (He did, however, help me with a different conundrum which came up later in the search; an interesting side-trip.)

I originally thought this was going to be a short trip, but trying to find an answer for Ruth took me down strange ways and into dark corners.  It was a long journey, so this is a long post, and like Gaul it is split into three parts.  I need to document my way carefully.  If you are going to accuse anyone – especially an academic – of misleading and unprofessional scholarship, then you do need to be sure of your facts.  As well as an author whose (academic) honesty I seriously doubt, I found a journal which could be mistaken for a respected authoritative publication but which uses practices which should give one pause.  This was a long, murky journey indeed.  It’s not all unpleasant, there were some good, interesting moments too.  I was amazed by how one thing just led to another.

And yes, I found a possible answer to that apparently simple question that got me going in the first place.  Read on.

Part 2 follows (soon).