A.
Wallwork, English for Research Usage, Style, and Grammar,DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1593-0_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York The rules for when to uses to indicate possession are not clear and are often contradictory. Even native
speakers are inconsistent, though most intuitively know what is and is not correct.
The rules of general English are that you should only use the genitive with:
people, companies, insitutes etc (e.g.
•
Smith’s book, Apple’s profits, IMT’s staff )
animals (e.g.
•
the dog’s bone )
in certain time expressions (e.g.
•
in three years time )
If you are not sure whether to use the genitive first see if you can find similar examples using Google Scholar. If you are still not sure then use the following formula noun +
of + noun (e.g.
the assets of the company rather than
the company’s assets ).
In any case, if you misuse the genitive it will rarely constitute a serious mistake. This section details when the above rules are and are not respected in research manuscripts.
2 Genitive the possessive form of nouns 12
2.1 position of the ’s with authors and referees 1. The
’s is placed immediately after the last letter of the author (or name, country, etc.
Note do not use the before the name of the author.
2. Even if the last letter of the author’s name is an
s , then still put an
’s. Exceptions non-English
surnames that end in a silent -s (e.g.
Camus’ first novel, Descartes meditations ).
3. When a paper has been
written jointly by two authors, only put an
’s after the last name or after et al. A similar rule applies to compound nouns (e.g.
his mother-in-law’s house ).
4. If two papers were written by two authors separately, then the
’s must be used for both authors.
5. If the noun is in the plural (e.g.
referees, those authors, editors, then put just an apostrophe (i.e. no
s ) after the plural
-s. 6. When a referee
is referred to by a number, put the
’s after the number.
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