01 September 2023 3 5K Report

I'm currently finalising the formatting for an MRes thesis. Now, I may have experience with statistical analysis and detailed report writing, but this relatively small issue has stumped me, perhaps due to fatigue. With that out of the way, how does one approach repeated abbreviations in a thesis with multiple chapters? I've not needed to do this before, and I may be overcomplicating it. I have a list of abbreviations to which the reader can refer, but the issue is how these abbreviations are presented in the main text. The first mention of a short story collection in my humanities thesis is obviously written out in full, yet it doesn't quite look right to resort to abbreviations thereafter. For example, in the introduction, I give the title 'The Gods of Pegana', yet I wouldn't wish to say 'Lord Dunsany’s first collection of fantasy writings, GP, consists of [...]' at the start of Chapter one. Is it a case of repeating the full title of a given work once in each chapter and then using its abbreviation? The issue there is that I have about 8 abbreviations that I commonly use, so it will take some time to go through each chapter and figure out what abbreviations I've used and when. There are quite a few layers to this, and it gets surprisingly complicated quickly.

Secondly, are second names given after the first mention throughout the entire thesis regardless of whether it's a new chapter?

Thanks.

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