Authoring a PhD
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BOLALAR UCHUN INGLIZ TILI @ASILBEK MUSTAFOQULOV, Ingliz tili grammatikasi
| Choosing a referencing system You will not get to choose a referencing system if the PhD regulations in your university specify a format which your thesis simply has to follow. However, the most common situation is that the doctoral thesis rules are vaguer, only requiring full referencing to be provided in a particular recognized and consistent format or in one of several commonly used formats. Here you still get a choice of system. There is an extensive literature of reference books dedicated to informing you in great detail about the very many different referencing formats that exist, all of which come in subtly complicated varieties. In addition many influential professional associations produce style guides for their areas, some of which are helpful, such as the Modern Languages Association guide. 12 If your university regulations do not specify a particular system then check whether the professional association for your discipline and your country has a recommended format. Even if you are studying outside the USA, you should nonetheless carefully consider whether the equivalent American association has a preferred format – because this will commonly be used also by many journals in your field. American referencing has certain basic features which people from smaller countries may need to take into account. Virtually all American references include the first names of authors and the initial of a second forename, as well as the family name (surname, as: Alvin B. Stiegler. Ina country of over 260 million people much more specificity in citation is required than in smaller countries, where reference lists often only include one forename initial. The advent of the World Wide Web means that citation searches are now frequently global in scope, and with only a surname and initial they will generate thousands of ‘confuser’ references. So the American convention is the only feasible one now, and it should be universally adopted. You can always abbreviate to one or two initials later on if that is what a particular journal demands. But finding author first names to fill out dozens of references where you only have initials is a good example of a referencing time bomb which can blowup in your face later on. In addition, most US journals will require details of both volume and issue numbers for journals, whereas W RI TING CLEARLY 3 in Europe volume alone is usually given. Again the only safe rule is to collect the fullest possible details from the outset. Making a commitment to a particular referencing system used to be a difficult decision. If you got it wrong you could find that you had a lot of extra work to do every time you wanted to publish something, shifting the referencing over to the format required by the particular journal you are targeting. There was always a pretty dismal chance of picking an optimal format here, since academic journals have remained quite stubbornly differentiated in the way that they handle references, across countries and across disciplines. Somewhere along the publishing line you are bound to have to redo your referencing for one purpose or another. However, much cheaper and easy-to-use PC software for storing notes and referencing on computer has now transformed this problem. As early in your PhD studies as possible you should consider adopting a well-known citations-handling package like Endnote as the basis for all your references. 13 Ideally your university will provide one of these packages as part of its central IT facilities, giving you free access when you work on campus. But most doctoral students also work extensively from a home PC now, so you will also need a copy of the same software for home or personal use, which your university IT services should be able to supply at a strongly discounted price. So long as you can meet the cost, this initial investment will normally payoff many times over in several ways. The package will store all your citations in a single database. You enter the full details only once but the packages can then deliver citations in many different alternative formats, enough to satisfy even journals with the most esoteric requirements. You thereby save enormously on retyping or copying across references between other documents. With a central database, finding the references you need for any chapter, conference paper or article can also be accomplished at the touch of a button. In many universities you can also now download book or article details from the main library catalogue or Web-based bibliographic systems straight into your referencing database, without any retyping or editing on your part. Apart from their extra cost, the only drawbacks of the packages are the learning costs of mastering anew separate package and of making it work with 2 AUTHORING AP H D less commonplace word processors (such as Linux or Apple ones. But the integration difficulties have now been solved for the major PC word processors. Your university library or IT services should provide free training courses in using their preferred referencing package, which are well worth attending. Alternatively you may choose not to employ a specialized package, but to try and get along with creating a large central references file in your existing word processor (such as Word or Wordperfect). There are several ways to do this, of which the worst is just to create a straight text file. Instead try to find out how you can construct a searchable table or database in the package that will meet your needs. Word and Wordperfect also have very sophisticated facilities that can help here. For example, both include a powerful facility to automatically switch footnotes over into endnotes, or to convert endnotes into footnotes. You can also use a database that comes as part of your standard office package (like Access in Microsoft Office, from which material can be easily moved across to your word processor. These options are well worth exploring, especially because most of us use only a fraction of the facilities in our extremely powerful word-processing software. If you have not used the relevant menus or buttons before, try searching the online ‘Help’ pages for tutorials, look in the company’s package manual (if you have one, or consult one of the many helpful guides to packages written by external authors and stocked in bookshops. Best of all, ask around amongst your colleagues for someone who is using these facilities and get them to show you how they work. Whatever you do about handling references, make sure that you start very early on in your PhD work that you do it on a PC (bin that card index if you still have one that your approach is a systematic one which creates a centralized reference storage facility and that you always regularly update this central file (and back it up several times) as you go along. Download 2.39 Mb. Share with your friends:
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