Timeline for What does "inclusive page numbers" mean?
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12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 11, 2021 at 7:06 | comment | added | user2768 | @JonCuster Historically, characters were expensive (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metal_movable_type.jpg)—I understand the rationale for abbreviations. They're just outdated. Much of the publication process is. (Physics is indeed notorious for long author lists. I guess they've gotten longer, as the world has gotten "smaller.") Absolutely agree with trimming words. (Another hint: Look for whitespace in paragraphs.) Personally, I take a hatchet to bibliographies, likely to an editor's chagrin. Entries need to be comprehensible, not necessarily prescribed (in proceedings of is redundant) | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 19:49 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @user2768 - and page limits used to be much more firm in the days of actual print. An Applied Physics Letter was 3 journal pages, absolute maximum. Physical Review Letters had to adjust their limits a bit for the (very) large big science papers (e.g. CERN) where the author list could be longer than the paper itself. Anyway, I remember hunting through the galley proofs to find where I could cut the minimum number of letters/words/numbers to get rid of an extra line or two to fit (hint, look at places with as little as possible left in a paragraph/citation, and cut there). | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 15:32 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @user2768 Yes, it does seem a bit outdated even to include page numbers at all in today's digital world. It makes sense in a print journal, though. Especially with volumes that number pages across issues, you can easily have 4 or 5 digit page numbers, and dropping 82340-82349 down to 82340-9 saves several characters and could easily prevent overflow to a subsequent line, which in turn could overflow to a subsequent page. It's an abbreviation that is common in citation styles so the expectation is that readers would be familiar, it's not something particular to any one journal. | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 15:27 | comment | added | user2768 | @BryanKrause Introducing an abbreviation—which readers must learn—for the purpose of dropping a digit, perhaps two, maybe even three, seems illogical, outdated if I'm being kind. Nonetheless, I've learned something (+1). | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 14:56 | comment | added | Bryan Krause♦ | @user2768 In some citation styles it is normal and standard to use the minimum digits for page ranges. 51-59 is written 51-9. You can read it as "pages fifty-one through -nine". If it were 251-269 you would write 251-69, etc. | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 14:55 | answer | added | Bryan Krause♦ | timeline score: 4 | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 9:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAcademia/status/1359426889614508033 | ||
| Feb 10, 2021 at 8:29 | comment | added | user2768 | That instruction seems rather poor. inclusive confuses, rather than informs me. Presumably exclusive page numbers shouldn't be used. But that'd surely be non-standard anyhow. The example looks to contain a typo, unless 9 abbreviates 59. (If it does, that should surely be mentioned.) Without context, it's difficult to know what should be avoided. For citations, some might find page numbers preferable to section numbers. (I don't, because page 576 of an eleven page paper isn't useful, unless I happen to know the paper starts on page 572.) Perhaps the instruction is common in your field. | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 8:23 | comment | added | user2768 | inclusive page numbers presumably means giving a range from the first relevant page to the last relevant page, rather than a range from the page after the first relevant page and the page before the last relevant page, the latter being "exclusive page numbers." | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 6:38 | answer | added | Massimo Ortolano | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 10, 2021 at 6:21 | review | First posts | |||
| Feb 10, 2021 at 12:26 | |||||
| Feb 10, 2021 at 6:17 | history | asked | sciencejedi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
