You will be required to give a "character count" for your comps paper which does not include your title page, in-text citations/bibliography, spaces, figures, and tables. Follow these steps to check your character count in Word when using Zotero:
- In your Word document, click on the "Zotero" tab, then click "Document Preferences." Change your citation style to a footnoted style such as "Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (note)," then click "OK."
- Your normal in-text citations will each be replaced by a number in superscript (1, 2, 3...).
- Highlight all the text of your comps (not your bibliography!) and open the character count menu (see the above video for a demonstration).
- In the character count menu, make sure the box labeled "Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes" is NOT checked.
- Record the number of characters listed for the "Characters (no spaces)" category.
- The "Characters (no spaces)" category will count each digit of your numbered in-text citations as a single character (meaning citation number 5 is counted as one character, while citation number 27 is two characters). Count up the total number of characters used by your in-text citations. This will take some basic math: for example, if you have 56 total in-text citations, the first 9 of those will be one character, and the remaining 47 will be two characters. 47 x 2 + 9 = 103, so your in-text citations would be using 103 characters.
- Subtract the number of characters used by your in-text citations from the total "Characters (no spaces)" count provided by Word. For example, if my "Characters (no spaces)" count was 9,859 characters, 9,859 - 103 = 9,756, so my actual character count would be 9,756 characters.
- Now that you've calculated your actual character count, change the citation style back to Stem Cell Repots or The American Naturalist using the "Document Preferences" menu.
- That's it! Your normal in-text citations should reappear.