Reference formatting

Typography & fonts
1

As a researcher having to deal with manuscript templates, I do find it hard to digest the automaic replacement of author names with “——” in one of the templates when several consequent references have the same set of authors. Any thoughts on that? Personally, I would still prefer to see the author names intact, rather than finding the first non-—— occurence. As you might have guessed, it is the IEEE-style citation/reference template.

It looks like this:

[3] John Q. Student, Jane D. Supervisor, “A Paper about a Topic Someone Should Really Care About”, in Proceedings of the International Conference of Whatever, Some Nice Location, 2020, pp. 1–6.
[4] ——, “Another Paper about the Same Topic”, in Proceedings of XYZ, Location, 2021, pp. 12423–12429.

2

I have tried to use a wider horizontal line rather than a mere em dash, which seems insufficient. Though I don’t know how strict the IEEE rules are.

3

There are many academic styles that use this convention. The MLA is one. I think Words into Type (in bad need of an update) dictates two en-dashes.

1 Like
4

Thank you for the input! It’s been on my to-do list for some time, but I’ve been meaning to get to the origin of this convention (which, I suspect, stems from yet another typewriter habit).