Word count

danellanutella
Hi there,
I am on a postgraduate psychology course and 3 of just failed a recently submitted essay because the word counts we provided were different to the word counts the examiners had. We were all using macs and Zotero in text citations using APA format. Our university uses windows. The discrepancy was about 200 words in each case.

Does anyone have any explanations as to how this might happen ?
  • adamsmith
    Before submitting an essay, you should use "remove Zotero field Codes" in a copy of the document. Send that copy to your prof, the journal you're submitting to, etc.
    With field codes removed, the word count is correct.
  • toddntucker
    Follow up question: when I do what adamsmith says, the field hyperlink is removed, but the text underlying it, i.e. (Smith 2009) remains, as non-field related text. Is there an easy way to extract all fields and associated text?

    This is important for my dissertation, as I have many references, and the inline citations (I use Chicago style) don't count against my word limit. I'm sure there is some basic regex programming that can get me a decent approximation of my inline-citation-less word count, but I wondered if there was an easier way.

    Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    nothing obvious -- but it might work to switch to a note based style, used endnotes and just select the text up to the endnote section. (Probably best to do this in a copy of the document, switching to endnotes and back is a bit iffy).
  • philsc
    Just bumped up against this problem. I am using footnotes, and each footnote number counts for between 10 and 300 words, when I turn off the fieldcodes, the footnotes count for fewer words - about 15 or so.

    Any idea what might be going on? I went to a word forum that suggests editing the templates and the Normal.dotm which I can't find on the computer.

    Is there a way of deleting all the footnotes from a document in one fell swoop so that one might be able to use the Word wordcount, or would I be better off just counting the words myself?
  • adamsmith
    Deleting all footnotes in Word is easy. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/176910
  • opensourcethought
    adamsmith's solution implies that three postgrad psych students failed their essays because their word count was a few hundred words too *low*. That they had seen an inflated count with extra field codes being counted that the uni didn't count. This is pretty unusual, right? Normally you would be penalised for going *over* the limit, not under it.
    danellanutella only says it was a discrepancy, not whether it was too high or too low, so it's hard to tell what actually happened.
  • danellanutella
    In my case the discrepancy was that the word count was over
  • DWL-SDCA
    I suspect that the failed essay problem was not merely that the word count was "too low" but that important concepts were not addressed.

    That said, it would be really nice in word processor developers made it easier to ignore such things as field codes when calculating word count.
  • danellanutella
    Note sure why you make these assumptions - my essay was OVER in word count and that was the only reason for the fail - I was very lucky that the university enabled me to resubmit - this thread is just a reminder to remove the field codes if you are new to using zotero. Try to be kind it’s a hard world
Sign In or Register to comment.