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I'm re-writing my PhD dissertation as a book manuscript. My dissertation includes in-text citations to back up what I'm saying in almost every sentence - (Doe, 2012). My brief review of academic books on my bookshelf seems to imply that books don't do this.

  1. I know the audience and purpose of a book is different than a manuscript, but shouldn't the level (and visibility) of academic rigor be maintained?

  2. In a book manuscript for a university press, how do you go about integrating these citations? Should they just be transferred to footnotes that include the full bibliographic reference? Do you maintain the in-text citation?

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    I am very interested in the answers to this one. I'm about a quarter of the way into an introductory text, where almost everything is a "well known fact" in the discipline.
    – Bob Brown
    Jan 24, 2017 at 12:24
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    "Rewriting my PhD dissertation as a book manuscript" sounds strange. You can publish a PhD thesis as a book and don't need to rewrite it. You basically can't rewrite a PhD thesis to become a textbook. If you write a research monograph then more or less the same rules as for a PhD thesis apply. Question like yours could be answered by the publisher. Do you have one already?
    – Dirk
    Jan 25, 2017 at 1:18
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    Most publishers have citation style guidelines. Ask your publisher, if there is one you should use for your book. Jan 28, 2017 at 10:44

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Since it is a book, you need not cite in-text in the same way you would an academic article. Simply transitioning to endnotes (super-script 1,2,3) will make the text immediately more readable. I'm reminded of Steven Pinker's book 'The Blank Slate' that contains many hundreds of citations but the text is not cumbersome due to efficient endnote use. In that work at least, Pinker puts the majority of 'main idea' endnotes at the end of a paragraph, reserving within-paragraph citations for very specific ideas. While this can at times lead to some ambiguity, it preserves readability.

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    This does not sound like a well founded answer. Different kinds of books in different fields and from different publishers have different styles.
    – Dirk
    Jan 25, 2017 at 1:19

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