Martin Paul Eve bio photo

Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

Email Books Twitter Github Stackoverflow MLA CORE Institutional Repo Hypothes.is ORCID ID  ORCID iD Wikipedia Pictures for Re-Use

A quick tip that I think it's worth raising, as it's just come to the fore in my life(!), is that the citation style you employ can have a large impact on the number of words over the course of an 80,000 word thesis.

I have been using, until today, the Chicago style with a full note on every page. Thankfully, I use Zotero, so I am easily able to switch the style throughout my whole document, albeit not so easily to an autor-date mode from a footnote. When I switched, though, to Chicago with an abbreviated note, I shaved a good 4000 words off my thesis; 4000 words that I would otherwise have had to lose from the body text.

In short: watch out for styles that overly repeat your bibliography.

Featured image by semuthutan under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.