How To Abbreviate Book In Text Citation For Long Titles?

Read the papers in the journal you are trying to get published in. These are the best examples of how other people write long titles for papers. Do they title a paper “The Left Hand of Darkness” or “Left Hand”? Once you read through enough papers in a journal, you start to pick up on certain patterns that reveal the writer is aware of the community of writers (i.e. the discipline and the journal) that they are writing for. Thus, even though the official handbook may say one thing, in practical application in a particular journal, there can be slight differences from the MLA handbook’s rules. Follow the successful examples in a particular journal.

Citing longer book titles in academic papers can be cumbersome, but with a few simple guidelines, many can be shortened. Most commonly, MLA cites the first major word or two of a very long title, thus after the first citation, The Great Gatsby becomes simply Gatsby. Similarly, under APA, To Kill a Mockingbird becomes Mockingbird, as the aim is to provide sufficient information to help the reader identify the work being cited but to keep the citation as brief and readable as possible. Chicago style for book titles merely drops the first article (The Lord of the Rings thus becomes Lord of the Rings). Remember that it is always best to consult your chosen style guide to establish the most consistent practice.

I have found citation formats to be tedious but once learned, very natural. In text citations of long book titles, it is best to be clear and consistent. MLA suggests shortening the title to the first noun phrase if too long. Therefore, in subsequent citations of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Unbearable Lightness would be used instead of the full title of the book. CMOS approaches this situation in a similar manner but tends to leave out articles unless necessary. Therefore, A Tale of Two Cities would be cited as Tale of Two Cities in subsequent references.

But APA style is all about less ambiguity and less clutter. So, for an extremely long title like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” I would cite this after the first full mention as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This creates the need for the abbreviation to be clearly traceable back to the full title in your references page. And it’s easy to decide on whether or not someone would instantly recognize an abbreviation by asking yourself the following question: Would someone flipping to your references page instantly recognize this?

I have another big problem with a fantasy series, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, starting with The Eye of the World. That book alone would probably be best to just shorten to “Eye of the World” in the parenthetical citation, as opposed to the full title The Eye of the World in the Works Cited entry. As for the rest of the series, my professor said that for a series of books, after the first full citation, we can use the abbreviation for the series in subsequent citations. So, for the first citation of The Eye of the World, it would be (Jordan, The Eye of the World 89). But then for the rest of the series, we could say (Jordan, TEOTW 89) after we defined TEOTW (The Eye of the Other World). But that’s a lot of extra work, and the in-text citation is just supposed to be a signpost to the corresponding Works Cited entry. Therefore, an abbreviation key would only be necessary if we had a dozen or so sources with very long titles. That would be a lot of extra work for both of us.