Italics for cited texts?

[Adrian Ho]

Dear colleagues, 

A professor at my institution has brought up this scenario: 

"We have a student who just passed her dissertation defense, and is about to turn in her written dissertation.  There was a bit of a unique scenario in that her introduction was comprised of a review paper that she authored.  Before her defense, she had obtained all of the appropriate permissions from the publisher to do this and it is indicated in the first paragraph that portions of the introduction are taken verbatim from the review (and the review is appropriately cited throughout).

 

There is one committee member who wants the student to put all of the text from the review paper in italics.  It is cited otherwise and the committee chair/student’s advisor does not want her to have to do this."  

The professor wondered if it is actually necessary to italicize the cited texts.  Given that there is already a citation of the review paper in the dissertation, I am inclined to think that italics isn't necessary.  But I am interested to find out how other schools and colleagues would handle a situation like this.  Thanks in advance for your advice and suggestions!  

Adrian Ho 

University of Kentucky Libraries 

[Read, Max]

Hi Adrian,

 

I would think this is a matter for your university’s style guide or the discipline style guide, not for an ETD forum. At UBC, we leave such decisions to the supervisory committee/graduate program to sort out, as they are the experts on what is usual in their particular discipline.

 

Cheers,

 

Max

 

Max Read

Associate Director, Student Academic Services

Office of the Dean and Vice-Provost | Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

The University of British Columbia | Vancouver Campus

Phone 604 822 0283 | Fax 604 822 5802

170 – 6371 Crescent Road | Vancouver, BC  Canada V6T 1Z2

max....@ubc.ca  | www.grad.ubc.ca  

 

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[Rey Ramos]

Hello Adrian,

I agree with Max, it really depends on the formatting style (APA, MLA, Chicago) prescribed by the institution. As a thesis supervisor/adviser and also handles Thesis Writing, I emphasized to my students that Background and Introduction sections of the report should contain the synthesis of the significant findings from your review of the literature to support the conduct of the study/research in terms of data gaps or issues/problems to be addressed. Thus, it is not necessary to quote completely the authors and encourage the students to really reword or paraphrase the information from the past studies to avoid "italics" texts.

We have a Research Manual approved by the Academic Council as a guide for faculty members handling thesis writing.

All the best,

Rey 

Engr. Reynaldo Perez-Ramos, PhD, MSc, MPhil-Env Engg

Director, Planning and Development

Romblon State University (RSU)

Odiongan, Province of Romblon

PHILIPPINES

(+63) 09472040114

http://rsuplandev.weebly.com/

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[Leila Belle Sterman]

Adrian,

In our "manuscript" style dissertations we let students use journal articles as chapters. There is a page at the beginning of the chapter that states where and when the manuscript was published and if there were any co-authors it states their contributions. The rest of the chapter is just the reprinted article. It would seem a disservice to the reader to have the whole thing in italics.

Leila Sterman