I would simply like to direct you to an enormously helpful electronic edition of The SBL Handbook of Style. For those who don’t know, it is based heavily on The Chicago Manual of Style, but is slightly adapted and annotated with examples for academic biblical studies. If you are a member of SBL, you can find a link to a free PDF version of the book from this page. I could give you the link to the actual PDF file, which anybody can view without a password, but I will heed Jim West’s recent admonitions to stay ethical.

For me, as a relative beginner to biblical research method, I have found it especially helpful for looking up acronyms (both ones I didn’t recognize and ones for which I wasn’t sure of the standard). For example, if you come across a reference to “Str-B” and ask yourself what the heck that is, you can do a search of the Handbook PDF and find that it is: Strack, H. L., and P. Billerbeck. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 6 vols. Munich, 1922–1961. It’s also good for looking to see what someone means by a certain work. You can look up “Migne” or “Lampe” and find out what those names refer to in biblical studies. That at least gives you a starting point to figure out what they’re talking about (for more info you can then look these up in, say, Danker’s Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study). And if you need to find how to cite a journal article, just find “journal article” in the document, the first one is in the Table of Contents and from there you need only click on “Journal Article” to take you the right page.

I’ve heard scholars and some doctoral students talk about how they’re old-fashioned and they like the hard copies. But this one seems like a no-brainer to me: free searchable PDF versus $25 hard copy? I did buy the hard copy before I knew about this, but I may end up just selling it because I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again!