Hi all who have submitted and passed,

How perfect was your referencing?

After a bad experience with endnote which shuffled my referencings setting me back a few months as I had to look them all up, I decided to do my referencing manually.

This has worked well thus far except that I wish my references were shorter. I did not want to use ibids and supras because they will only complicate my referencing. So i have resorted to citing the name of paper in full the first time and in short ie. author,yr and pg the second time. Because of word count am considering using ibid where references below are similar but not supra at all. So if i cite a, i can have 4 ibids, then b, then a again and a few ibids. (Sorry if i have lost you already!)

in short, my style has no name. i obviously wish it was better but..

how many examiners seriously get hung up on style?

i have no idea about 'ibids'??? and I would never dream of not using endnote - I wouldn't remember if I'd cited peopel before in a previous chapter or something and therefore would get confused over et als and full references.

Although I have a thesis I look at sometimes for structure tips - and I tried to find some of the references and the bloke had referenced them completely wrong, wrong date and authors etc! and he passed with no corrections so...

anyways, that isn't very helpful, sorry!

Hi Jojo,I understand what you mean. Using Ibidem is o.k, but as I found out it's problematic if you continue to work and add or remove notes as you go along. You forget what it pertained to. I use footnotes as I find endnotes very annoying. I hate books with endonotes, where you have to read back and forth to understand something of what is going on.
If I were you I would insert a page with abbreviations at the beginning of your thesis, e.g. after your table of content, where you can put abbreviations for very long titles, especially if you cite them often.

E.g J. C. Habel, Relict Species: Phylogeography and Conservation Biology, Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag, c 2010
in the abbr. page: J. C. Habel, RS (c 2010)

I hope it's useful ::$

...and also: perhaps your department has specific guidelines for styles. It's better if you check with them before you make further changes.

I find Ibid really problematic when I'm writing, especially if I then edit, I've had the nightmare before of using Ibid, then edited a page, realised the Ibid doesn't relate at all to what's above it and had to go through wasting ages trying to find where I got the flipping quote from lol. I normally use short referencing instead and I think in my rules and regs it does state no Ibids. Having said that, when I'm reading a book I have found short referencing problematic if it isn't done well, but nowhere near as frustrating as Ibid ;-)

I don't use Endnote - I reference manually, but maybe I should look into it - is it freeware?

thanks guys. am very tempted to use ibid but am afraid of frustration if i move anything around. So if I do, this will only be after am sure nothing is moving.

Corinne - I thought of such a page but removed it after thinking it would increase my word count. I'm considering having it but only using one name of the author and year and no initials. (I will think further on how I can make this work for me.)

Sneaks - that is VERY reassuring! endnote is not an option for me and i would also never recommend it to anyone after my experience! but i do appreciate it is quite useful when it works as it should.

My uni only says referencing should be consistent. there are no rules on style. so any - even my own - as long as its consistent will do.

Extremely knackered! am happy to report that i've been able to do all the literature reviews Y, Z and W and incorporated them in my work. that should put me back in the game - timewise.

am so happy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! an early finish today, so fb, TV, phone and friends allowed!

My department had its own format, and I couldn't persuade EndNote to produce it. So I did all my referencing manually. It was fine. I've since (since hard bound corrected submitted copies!) found a few tiny typos in the bibliography, like an extra comma or something. But nothing major, and they weren't even picked up by examiners. Actually they found no typos in my references.

Not passed yet, but I have also produced my refs using the 'old', that is manual method, because endnote doesn't want to play ball and won't produce the right format. I'm also using endnotes as I have been told that that is the way to go and is what is expected nowadays, although I also find them irritating and would prefer to use footnotes. however I have a feeling that the new office word I have would actually convert one to the other if asked - I've not tried it as I don't want it to have a fit and lose the lot, but might have a go with a shorter piece of work.

I know that in theory referencing is a personal choice, but I'm not sure how examiners would warm to that idea, and if they are anything like one examiner who gave us a talk, they are quite picky about refs, this person said they looked at refs first, and made tables and grids so that they could check on how many times the author had been quoted etc. in fact they apper to subject the refs to the third degree as their first step when looking at the thesis. I've had to make up my own refs for old manuscripts that have been reprinted, but havecopied a similar style I've seen elsewhere, so I can defend what I have done.

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I have to follow the style used by my department, which means manually doing the whole thing: ibid. and all! My sup's taught me a few tricks to keep the word count short. If you use one source quite a few times, then you can abbreviate it, so The Journal of Molecular Biology can be shortened to JMB. The first time you cite it put in brackets next to it (hereafter cited as JMB), and then use the abbreviation from there on.

Also, little things like 'p. 155' or 'p155' are both ok and you can use either one of them (as long as you are consistent). However, the former counts as two words whereas the latter counts as one! By doing this I've managed to cut at least 400 words from my final count!

Instead of: "Jones (2003), p. 107" I just do: "Jones, op. cit., p107". If I'd used Jones in the previous footnote, then I just do: "ibid., p107". If it's the same page from Jones as per my last footnote, then I just do: "ibid." (which means the same page of Jones as my last footnote). In the end, either "ibid." or "ibid., p107" would count as less words than "Jones (2008), p. 107". I keep an Excel sheet where I keep note of who I've cited first, which chapter and which pages number. That way, by chapter four, if I'm unsure if I've given full reference to one author already, I glance at the excel sheet (do a quick search). The excel sheet's really handy because I can do my bibliography straight from there.

Hope this helps.

In the end, I think it's best checking with your sup as mine was quite particular about the system that I should use.
:$

Quick question: When you put something in acronymns list that is before the main text of thesi say:

The Apple Code -The Apple Code (1992), Report of the Farmers on the Growing of Apples: The Code of Best Practice, Fruits Professional Publishing, London.

Would you then cite it first in full in the main text or is it ok that its first appearance in main text is as 'The Apple Code.' ?