Hi everyone - do you know if in text citations count towards a final word count? I'm writing a lit review paper, and of course have hundreds of citations, and my word count limit is rather low (6000). My professor has insisted that I refer to EVERYTHING that we have discussed, and so I'm really struggling to cut the words down and still have a coherent paper. Is it cheeky to exclude the citations?
Thank you!

Hi Kezia,

you can try to write the article without citations and assure this is coherent and complete.

Then add in a few citations, some of which you can put in a box as "illustration". Text in boxes usually does not count towards the word count.

In my place citations do not count towards your final word count. Technically they're not your words, so why count them? This is to say nothing of the pain of adding up all your citations, but even if you get a rough count of what you're citing you can be more liberal with your overall estimate of how many words the paper actually is.

I have to quote large sections of newspaper columns and several stanzas of poems etc, if this counted towards my final word count, I'd never get to say anything. So no, I don't think it's cheeky in the slightest!
Best of luck.;-)

Thanks!