
Best way to deal with citations
I am working on a book that has very extensive citations--marked in the text by a footnote. Does anyone have advice about the best way to handle this in an ebook, predominantly aiming as Kindle. As much as I like the idea of a hot link to the citation, ebooks I have read that did this sent me to the reference list at the end of the book making it hard to get back to the section I was reading. Due to the lack of pagination having actual hotlinked footnotes seems to be challenging. So I am wondering if I should have just plain text superscripts, or provide the author and year--in either case leaving the reader to manually go to the reference list when/if they want to?
June 4, 2018, 8:30 pm
Responses (32)
Its for the purpose of not violating plagiarism. You just borrowed their words. So its really prim and proper to credit it to them. Its also be good for you that you have come across with their work.
I’d say put the citations down in plain text so the reader can look them up manually if they’re really that interested. Citations are basically there just to cover your butt if anyone questions your sources and not meant to be an integral part of the work itself.
To me it just makes the overall document flow better and makes it far easier to read.
It's because when you use a live link the reader might forget about the story and just go to the cited site and read everything. While in manual links, readers tend to hate manually inputting the address or even doing cut and paste. This ensures that readers stay and finish the book.
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REFERENCES
[1] reference for this
[2] reference for book
[3] reference for reading
Plain text footnotes that leave it to the reader to look up manually, simple and effective. The fact is that there are going to be plenty of readers who simply don't care to look up citations, and the ones that actually do care for citations and references are going to care enough to look them up manually. I'd say stick to traditional footnotes and you should be fine.