My girlfriend was advised to use Ibid
in her assignment's citations to help reduce the word count
(I pointed out that references are usually not part of the count, but regardless); but she couldn't grasp the concept or why Ibid
would be used.
I explained that it would typically be used when writing footnotes1 and that the material you were referencing2 is the same, and used in more than one place3. ^1: Anon, Lorem Ipsum (SE Publishing, 1999), p23 ^2: Ibid. ^3: Ibid., p30
My argument was that you would save redundancy, by not having to write out the author name/title again, as well as provide a logical way of keeping footnotes numbered (1,2,3..) rather than (1,1,1,2) if the same work was cited more than once.
Is my understanding correct? Could anyone clarify and explain it in a better way?