Parallel Citation

A parallel citation is a citation that identifies the same source in more than one publication series. The practice is standard in Anglo-American legal writing: a court decision may be cited to the official reporter and to one or more commercial reporters at the same time, e.g. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). Each reporter carries the same case; the parallel form lets a reader working from any of the three collections find it without further searching.

Outside law, the same idea appears in editions of classical and biblical texts. A quotation from Plato may be given by page and section of the Stephanus edition (the standard reference) alongside the page number of whatever modern translation the writer is using. A quotation from the Bible may be given by book, chapter, and verse in one canonical numbering and, in parentheses, in an alternative numbering used by other traditions.

Parallel citation matters because access is uneven. Not every library holds the official reporter; not every reader owns the Loeb. Giving both anchors — one canonical, one commonly available — respects the reader who wants to check the source without owning the writer's library.

Common mistake: giving parallel citations selectively, so that some sources have parallels and others do not. The signal to the reader should be consistent: either the piece is a parallel-citation piece, in which case every case has its full set, or it is not, in which case the primary reporter suffices.