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As a reader of research, once you understand the purposes of notes and the cryptic abbreviations used, the structure of the note itself will be self-explanatory. Exactly how a note is formatted is unimportant as long as sufficient information is included to allow you to identify the source cited and consult it.
There are a few common citation styles for scholarly publications, such as those of the Modern Language Association, the American Psychological Association, and the University of Chicago. There are also specialized styles for some disciplines, and publications or publishers may have their own styles. I won't discuss any of these in detail because the differences between them are unimportant to the reader or researcher2. Most style choices are arbitrary, like which side of the road you drive on, and will get you where you want to go. So, if you're the writer choose one and stick to it, or if you're writing for a specific publication, find out what style it uses and follow that.
As a reader or researcher, all that you need to know is how to use a citation to check a source, and to do that you need the following information:
If the work is an article published in a magazine, journal, or newspaper, then the title of the article itself should be included along with the full title of the periodical. As with books, there are often multiple periodicals with the same title. In particular, there are many newspapers called "The Times", "The Herald", "The Tribune", etc., so newspapers are usually differentiated by their place of publication. For instance, there are the London Times, New York Times, and Washington Times. In some cases, the name of the city is incorporated into the title, as in The New York Times, but in other cases it is not, as in The Times of London.
That's it. That is all that's needed in a citation. Many notes, as well as citation styles, include the name of the publisher and the place of publication, but I've never found these useful. Theoretically, if you want to get hold of a book you could contact the publisher directly, but who does that nowadays? This information was perhaps useful in the past, but today you can easily find almost any published book from an online bookseller. The place of publication is even less likely to be of value than the publisher's name; who needs to know that a book was published in Evanston, Illinois? For these reasons, I suggest omitting this information from citations, which would save some space at the foot of the page; that it continues to be recommended by style guides is, I suspect, the result of scholarly inertia.
Notes:
Quote: "…[T]he long list of claims, the filibuster of excuses about why schools could not open that were made repeatedly by politicians, union leaders, influencers, the media, and health authorities―and others in the medical field who had no expertise on viral transmission or mitigation, but whom journalists treated as experts anyway―was a systematic fiction. Even more than two years later, in the fall of 2022, after the reckoning of abysmal academic outcomes from school closures became an acceptable admission in polite society, many epidemiologists, other public health professionals, and pundits simply framed this as the unfortunate consequence of a wrenching decision between saving lives from COVID or harming kids by keeping them out of school. But this damned if you do, damned if you don't narrative was a false binary, representing a fundamental misunderstanding about the lack of benefit of school closures. Much of Europe, and many areas of the US where schools were kept open the longest in aggregate, suffered no greater numbers of cases, or subsequent morbidity and mortality, than areas where schools were closed the longest."1
Title: An Abundance of Caution
Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions
Author: David Zweig
Date: 2025
Summary: This book tells the story of only one aspect of the coronavirus pandemic, namely, the effect of the virus on children and the misguided efforts to protect them by closing schools.
Review: There will be another pandemic, probably sooner than expected, and little has been done to prepare for it. The first step in doing so is to review what happened, and especially what was done wrong, during the last one. We probably won't make exactly the same mistakes again since it may be an influenza virus, or some other kind of virus, rather than a coronavirus, that causes the next one. But if we don't understand how those mistakes came about, new mistakes will be made in the same old ways.
I was already familiar with much that Zweig covers in this book, and even wrote about some of it at the time2, but one thing still surprised me: how early in the pandemic the basic facts about the coronavirus and its effects were known. This was a triumph for the science of epidemiology, but a miserable failure of journalists and public health authorities to communicate those facts to the public. In this book, Zweig exposes that failure by thoroughly documenting what was known about the coronavirus and when, as opposed to what was said about it by politicians and reporters. He explains:
…[N]early all of the evidence I present in this book was known in real time or in advance. The single most important myth that this book seeks to debunk is the notion that various interventions―most specifically related to schools and kids―were reasonable of even necessary to be employed because "we didn't know" at the time about their lack of benefit, or the relatively benign course for children from the virus. On the other side of the coin, it was similarly false to say "we didn't know" about the harms that would accrue from these largely ineffective interventions.3
Throughout the pandemic, we were often told to "follow the science", yet government bureaucrats and journalists repeatedly failed to tell us where the science was headed. As a result, ineffective and harmful measures, such as school closings, were taken.
Here, based on this book and my own research, and illustrated with some quotes from the book under review, are what I think were the primary sources of error during the pandemic:
Models are a useful and necessary part of epidemiology; they're one tool scientists use to try to predict what will happen. But the Achilles' heel of models is that they are always based on sets of statistical assumptions, which are then plugged into mathematical formulas that spit out results or ranges of results. The formula itself might be valid, but if you insert the wrong numbers then you get the wrong result. Researchers tartly call this problem "garbage in, garbage out."4
…[F]or journalists at prestigious outlets, the majority of whom are politically aligned with those in the public health establishment, investigating or critiquing the policies espoused by the people on their team was tantamount to helping the enemy. Many in public health shared with their peers in the media this instinct against tolerating any public dissent with the tribe.5
Since much of the public relies on the media for information about policies and practices, journalists have an epistemic duty to investigate on their own or to press the experts they are quoting for the evidence behind their claims. …[I]n many circumstances neither of these functions were performed. Succinctly: there was an astonishing lack of curiosity by professionals whose job is to be curious. Which raises the question: Why is it that journalists, and the broader educated elite traditionally, or at least ideally, bring great skepticism to the claims made by and the motives of every major institution in society, from religion to big business to government, yet when it came to the pandemic policies espoused by Fauci, the CDC, and the public health establishment…in so many instances their skepticism vanished?6
I believe this is the first time I've recommended a book as "Recommended Reading", since usually I just recommend articles and essays, but that shows just how important this book is. Zweig obviously put an enormous amount of time and energy into it, and I think that the book deserves at least a little of our own effort in return.
Nitpicking: This is an important book but not a perfect one; of course, no book is. One of Zweig's greatest strengths is, perhaps, his greatest weakness, namely, his thoroughness. Zweig marshalls so much evidence in favor of his thesis that it's overkill―not in the sense that it undermines his own argument, but that it's just too much. Zweig makes his point seven ways to Sunday, when six would have sufficed. If you're not convinced by the arsenal of evidence that Zweig presents here, then nothing will convince you; whereas, if you're as convinced as I am, the excess can become tedious7.
I'm not suggesting that you use its length as an excuse not to read it, rather that you don't need to read the whole thing to get its benefits. In particular, there are three sections in the book labelled "Deep Dives":
This section is a history of some previous medical mistakes; specifically, about peanut allergies, scurvy, and in what position babies should sleep. I didn't need any convincing that medical experts are fallible, but I still found the section fascinating.
This section is primarily a debunking of the unfounded claim, made repeatedly by the teachers' unions, that schools shouldn't open until they had expensive ventilation systems using HEPA filters, which would have taken months if not years to implement. I found this section less interesting than the previous one.
Unlike the previous two "deep dives", this one is directly related to the main thesis of the book. However, of all the policies adopted during the pandemic, this is the only one that seems to be now widely admitted to have been both unnecessary and harmful―see the quote at the beginning of this review. So, if you're already convinced that closing schools harmed children, you might just as well skip this section, which makes terribly depressing reading. In contrast, all those politicians and teachers' union officials who pushed for school closings and resisted their reopening should be forced to read it.
I've nitpicked the book above, not because I want to discourage you from reading it, but because I want to encourage you. There is an almost overwhelming amount of important information in this volume, and I don't want you to use that as an excuse to avoid it. In addition, the emotions that the book may evoke―the regret, anger, even guilt―may also at times feel overwhelming. But we need to face the facts, as unpleasant as they may be, about what went wrong during the last pandemic if we're not to go through an even worse future one. If you should open the book and find yourself feeling overwhelmed, keep in mind that you can skip the "Deep Dives" without losing track of the book's main thread.
Recommendation: Highly recommended, but with the proviso that you needn't read the whole thing.
Notes:
Mrs. Blanc had once again1 agreed to host a family Thanksgiving dinner this year and to cook the meal herself. How much food did she need to prepare? She had invited the following Blanc family members: a husband, a wife, a grandfather, a grandmother, two fathers, two mothers, four children, two grandchildren, two siblings, one brother, one sister, two sons, two daughters, one father-in-law, one mother-in-law, one son-in-law, and one daughter in law―Mrs. Blanc herself is included in this list. 26 family members!2
Assuming that all of the invitees attend, what is the minimum number of people―including the hostess―who will need to be fed?
Some invitees are counted more than once. For instance, a brother is also a sibling.
Six
Explanation: We are told that there are four children at the dinner party, so there are at least four attendees, but we're also told that there are a grandfather and grandmother, as well as a father and mother. No one can be both a grandparent and parent of the same person, so for every grandparent, there must be at least two others, one a child and the other a grandchild. Since there are two sons and two daughters, there must be six at a minimum: two grandparents, two children, and two grandchildren.
It's possible that you may have come up with a different family tree that satisfies the relationships in the puzzle. However, I think six family members is minimal unless you engage in a trick such as that in the song "I'm My Own Grandpa"3, in which the narrator is actually his own step-grandfather―that's cheating. You might be able to get the number down to one if time travel were possible4, but science fiction is out.
Here's a quote from a book on quotations by Paul F. Boller, Jr.:
…Admiral Lewis Strauss…chose…to quote Dr. William Neuman…cautiously warning against continued [nuclear] testing: "Our ignorance in this field is so great that we cannot say with any certainty that we have not already put so much strontium-90 into the stratosphere that harmful fall-out is not inevitable."2
Since nuclear testing is back in the news3, this quotation is accidentally topical, but what does it mean? Boller calls it a "triple-negatively worded statement", but I'm not sure how he arrived at the number three, since I count four negations, highlighted above: "-not" on the end of "cannot", "not", "not" again, and "in-" on the front of "inevitable". Given its complex structure and many negations, Neuman's statement is difficult to understand. Boller goes on to say that Neuman was "suggesting danger from nuclear tests", but is that right?
If you'd like to have a go at untangling Neuman's statement, stop here and do so. Click on the button below to see my analysis.
Let's start out by analyzing the overall structure of Neuman's statement. It's hard to understand partly because it has an internal sentence wrapped within two modifiers. Let's call this internal sentence "S1":
S1: We have not already put so much strontium-90 (Sr-904) into the stratosphere that harmful fall-out is not inevitable.
So, the entire statement can be abbreviated:
Our ignorance in this field is so great that we cannot say with any certainty that S1.
The two sentence modifiers are the phrases "our ignorance in this field is so great that" and "we cannot say with any certainty that". The second of these modifiers directly modifies S1:
S2: We cannot say with any certainty that S1.
S2 tells us that we can't be sure S1 is true. The other modifier modifies S2:
S3: Our ignorance in this field is so great that S2.
S3 is actually Neuman's full statement, and it explains why S2 is true, that is, it explains why we can't say S1 with any certainty. The reason we can't be sure about S1 is that we're too ignorant about the effects of nuclear testing. Neuman would have been more understandable if he'd made this proviso into a separate claim and eliminated the first negation. For instance:
It's hard to be sure that we have not already put so much Sr-90 into the stratosphere that harmful fall-out is not inevitable. This is because our ignorance in this field is so great.
So, let's unwrap S3 by removing the outer modifier and turn to S2. The remaining inner modifier simply says that it's hard to be sure about S1, but what is hard to be sure about? We've eliminated one negation by paraphrasing it away but three remain. Can we get rid of any more?
The most obvious simplification that can be made to S1 is to remove the double negation at its end―"not inevitable". To say that something is "not inevitable" is to say that it is "evitable", which is a real if uncommon English word meaning "avoidable"5. Therefore, we can simplify S1 to:
S1': We have not already put so much Sr-90 into the stratosphere that harmful fall-out is evitable.
However, it is likely, given Boller's report of what Neuman meant, that he should have written:
We have already put so much strontium-90 into the stratosphere that harmful fall-out is inevitable.
Even though both sentences have only a single negation, they do not mean the same thing. Compare the following two sentences:
Sentence 1 is denying that the turkey has been so long in the oven that burning is avoidable, which implies that if it were left longer in the oven burning would be avoidable. However, the longer the turkey is in the oven the more likely it is to burn6. So, sentence 1 implies something false. Sentence 2, in contrast, says something sensible, namely, that the turkey has been in the oven too long and burning can no longer be avoided.
Similarly, Neuman was apparently questioning whether nuclear testing had already put so much Sr-90 into the atmosphere that fallout couldn't be avoided. Therefore, he should have said something similar to the following:
We know so little that it's hard to be certain, but we may have already put so much Sr-90 into the atmosphere that fallout is unavoidable.
This has only one negation and it's perfectly understandable if a little wordy.
It appears that Neuman got so tangled up in his own modifiers and negations that he said something he didn't mean. This is why you should avoid using too many negations as you will not only confuse your readers, but you may also confuse yourself.
Notes:
Recent codifiers of scholarly usage tend to prefer repeating the short title2 to any use of the Latin abbreviations, and indeed there are indications that the whole apparatus is being simplified as well as Anglicized. But since thousands of books use the older systems dating back as far as the seventeenth century, it behooves the researcher to learn the classic symbols and usages.3
While not as common as they once were, abbreviations of Latin words and phrases still occur in the notes to some scholarly works. Moreover, such notes are ubiquitous in works from previous centuries. In order to detect misleading notes, you have to first understand what the notes mean.
Why Latin? For the same reason that people still wear those silly black robes and square hats during a graduation ceremony: tradition. No one now wears a gown and mortarboard outside of graduation, but in the middle ages it was standard scholarly attire4. To don this garb at graduation is to announce that you are now a scholar who is a part of a tradition stretching back many centuries to a time when people dressed funny5.
Latin used to be the language of scholarship, so that scholars who spoke different native languages could communicate in a common scholarly tongue. Today, that language is no longer Latin, but English, which is one reason why Latin in notes is diminishing if not disappearing entirely.
Why are the Latin words and phrases used in notes abbreviated? It's not to make them more mysterious, though it may have that effect, but to make them more compact so as to take up less space at the foot of the page―endnotes can afford to be more expansive. For the same reason, footnotes are often printed in a smaller font than the text, which can make them difficult to read. In notes, space is precious.
Here are the most common abbreviations, not in alphabetical order but roughly in frequency of occurrence and importance to understand:
8 Quoted in W. K. Hancock, Country and Calling, London, 1954, 95.9
This says that the quote in the text on the same page that is followed by a superscript "8" is from page 95 of the book Country and Calling by W. K. Hancock, which was published in London in 1954. So, the subsequent quote, followed by a superscript "9", is from the same page of the same book.
The purpose of "ibid." is to save the scholar and the reader from repeating the same citation as given in the previous note, but what do you do when you want to cite a work you've already cited but not in the immediately preceding note? That's where our next abbreviation comes in:
16. Methods of Ethics (Macmillan, 1874).…12
We can tell that this is the relevant work because the author, Henry Sidgwick, is mentioned in the text in both places. If multiple authors have already been noted, then "op. cit." would need to be preceded by the author's last name in order to indicate which work is cited.
6 Albert Einstein, "Autobiographical Note," in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. P. A. Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1949), p. 45.14
This tells us that the quote of Einstein on the same page comes from page 45 of Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by P. A. Schilpp, and published in Evanston, Illinois in 1949. Several pages later, we see the note:
14 Einstein, loc. cit.15
This indicates that the claim followed by a superscript "14" on the same page comes from the same book and page as the previously cited quote from Einstein.
Robert J. Gula wrote forty-five years ago about "loc. cit." that: "This abbreviation used to be used in footnotes but has recently been replaced by ibid., or by the author's last name followed by the first words of the title [that is, the "short title"]."16 As mentioned above, "op. cit." is sometimes used this way, so "loc. cit." can be dispensed with, but you still may come across it, especially in older works such as Kuhn's.
30. … An instructive study of metaphor has been made by I. A. Richards,… Interpretation in Teaching (Harcourt, Brace, 1938), passim. … 18
This means that the "instructive study of metaphor" is found here and there throughout the book cited.
Those are the most common Latin abbreviations used in notes that don't also occur in the text itself, or in other contexts. In the next installment, we'll anatomize the structure of a citation.
Notes: