Convert your law dissertation's citations to OSCOLA
OSCOLA differs from other academic styles more than you might expect - there are no in-text parenthetical citations at all, everything runs through footnotes, and bibliography entries take no closing full stop.
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1,000 words costs 5 credits
Job files are kept for 7 days and then removed; the job record stays.
What this style looks like
- In-text citation
- 1 John Smith and Amy Lee, ‘Deep Learning for Protein Folding’ (2023) 20(3) Nature Methods 245.
- Reference list entry
- Smith J and Lee A, 'Deep Learning for Protein Folding' (2023) 20(3) Nature Methods 245
Three OSCOLA rules people trip over
OSCOLA is the standard across UK law schools and widely adopted in Commonwealth jurisdictions. Its differences from social-science styles like APA and Harvard are structural, not cosmetic.
No in-text citations - everything is a footnote. If you have been writing with author-date parentheticals, the whole document has to move to footnotes. That is a change of citation system, not a formatting tweak.
Bibliography entries take no closing full stop. This is OSCOLA’s most distinctive rule and the most commonly missed: the footnote ends with a full stop because it is a complete sentence; the bibliography entry does not. People instinctively add one to every line, and correcting it means touching hundreds of entries.
Cases, legislation, and secondary sources follow three different rule sets. Most reference managers only handle secondary sources, leaving cases and legislation to be written by hand - and in a law dissertation those are often the bulk of the citations. We standardize the entries already present in your document; case and legislation rules are version-sensitive, so spot-check against the OSCOLA edition your institution specifies.
FAQ
Will it change my body text?
No. The body is frozen throughout; only in-text citations and the reference list are processed. That is also why it costs far less than humanizing - 5 credits per 1,000 words.
My dissertation currently uses Harvard in-text citations. Can it become OSCOLA footnotes?
Partly, and it is worth knowing where the line is. Entry formatting is standardized to OSCOLA. But we will not manufacture footnote anchors that your document does not already have - if the source uses author-date parentheticals with no notes, we reformat the entries and leave the existing markers alone rather than inventing note positions. Placing the footnotes is a judgement about your argument, so it stays yours.
Are case and legislation citations handled?
Entries already present in the document are processed. But case citations - especially neutral citations and law-report abbreviations - are complex, and institutions may specify different OSCOLA editions, so spot-check against your own faculty guidance afterwards.
Are the closing full stops handled automatically?
Yes, per OSCOLA rules. It is the easiest rule to get wrong by hand and one of the biggest time savings here.
What does it cost for one paper?
5 credits per 1,000 words - the cheapest of our four tools, because only the citations are processed. An 8,000-word paper runs about 40 credits (under $0.50). New accounts get 100 free credits.