A user arrived the other day in a state of some
perplexity. She was using the OSCOLA style, and the punctuation between the
place published (a colon) and the publisher vanished, as did the comma after the
publisher and before the date:
Ramsey I T, On Being Sure in Religion (London Athlone Press 1963)
The style, however, was set up to
deliver the required punctuation marks, however.
Author, |Title|, vol Volume|
(|Series
Editor ed,^eds, |Translator tr,^trs, |Edition edn, |Place
Published|: Publisher|, Year|)
My
fiddling drew a blank, and so I was forced to retire to my desk to ponder
further. Eventually, I found what was going on, although admittedly, I have no
idea why. It turned out that the publisher and the place published fields in the reference itself had a
blank space at the end.
So,
instead of being ‘London’ the entry was ‘London ‘.
The
removal of the white space at the end of the entry restored the colon and
comma:
Ramsey I T, On Being Sure in Religion (London: Athlone Press, 1963)
Which just goes to show that when
strange things happen, sometimes it is the fault of the data, rather than the
style, although I cannot see why a bit of cunning string handling and slicing
could not sort this issue.
