Chapter 21Free sample

Unpublished & Forthcoming

Working papers, forthcoming works, dissertations, speeches, letters and interviews.

A published work comes with an address: volume, page, publisher. An unpublished one has none, so your citation does the publisher’s job. It says how far the work got, which version you read, and where a copy lives. In June 2026 the Supreme Court cited a 2014 history dissertation, never published as a book, for how voters once cast ballots among their neighbors, Watson v. Republican Nat’l Comm., 609 U.S. 672, 679 (2026). Because the Court named the degree and the university, the text is easy to find, free, in Wayne State’s repository.

A dissertation, pinpointed to the printed page

David A. Collins, Absentee Soldier Voting in Civil War Law and Politics 2 (Ph.D. dissertation, Wayne State Univ. 2014).

1 author, as the title page names him
2 title, italic in a brief
3 printed page, not the PDF viewer’s count
4 degree and kind of work: the stage
5 institution, shortened
6 year of the degree, not of posting

Posted is not published. A paper on SSRN, arXiv or a school’s server has no journal’s acceptance behind it, and its author can swap the file. An article its author also posted is published: cite the journal (chapter 18). Not in this chapter: unpublished court opinions, which are cases (14.7); filings (chapter 16); agency rulings, notices and manuals (15.8); presidential remarks (15.6); testimony (17.4); papers in an archive (chapter 26). Whether a court lets you cite a work is another question (14.10).