I’m seeing it pop up in bibliographies more and more. It seems to be a vague reference to source material somewhere. I’ll be reading a paragraph from a book as follows:
So I flip to the back of the book to see what footnote (15) has to say about the source of that interesting tidbit, only to find this mysterious entry:
Gee, thanks.
And as I look through the footnotes I see that Ibid seems to be quite the popular source for footnotes. What is Ibid, exactly? What do I need to do if I want to get to the bottom of this Henry Ford/indecent exposure story? Is there an Ibid research clearinghouse I can call up to ask for all information relating to Henry Ford & public nudity? Who’s job is it to scour the mountains of reference material and come back to me with my answers?
From the latin for “in the same place”, or more colloquially “l’m too lazy to type the source over again, and want to show off my classical education”.
(15): Ibid indicates “look at (14)”. The convention is that “ibid” may be used for any consecutive string of footnotes from the same source.
Basically, “Ibid.” is Latin for “ditto” (or, more literally, “the same”). It means that the source for the statement flagged by footnote (15) is exactly the same as the source for the statement flagged by footnote (14).
I mean, if an author cites the same source material several times in the space of a page, there’s no reason for the bibliography to spell out the title, author and date of the source text repeatedly, is there? It’s easier to spell that all out once, and then write “Ibid.” in the footnotes, every other time he alludes to it.
“Ibid” means the reference cited came from the same source (and page) as the preceeding citation.
When you were doing the paper or whatever on a non-correctable typewriter it shortened your work markedly. Especially with footnotes where you had to virtually quess how long the reference was going to be so you could fit it on the page.
This many replies, and no one’s mentioned what it’s an abbreviation for. Anyway, ‘ibid.’ is short for ibidem, meaning given by astorian supra.
As for other well-respected references, ‘op. cit.’ (opus citatum - the work cited) is used for a second reference to the same work, giving a modicum of information (usually just the author) to identify it. The less common ‘loc. cit.’ (locus citatum - the place cited) is when another reference to both the same work and same page is made.
Just one more thing: because it is an abbreviation (as panamajack explained), make sure you remember to place a period directly after Ibid., if it’s not already at the end of the line; also, it may be preferred that you italicize it as well.
Amazing. Of all the possibilities I was considering, that was absolutely the last. I came up with http://ibid.caltech.edu in a google search, and thought that Caltech must be doing an awful lot of gofer-type work looking up obscure citations for various authors.