52 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality too, can be correctly used when referring to studies and their authors: for example, ‘The study by Jones (1985) explored the migration habits of monarch butterflies’ and ‘Johnson (2010) investigated the phenomenon by making extensive use of the work of Jones (1985).’ As with so much about writing well, there are no hard and fast rules to follow except that it will always help to conceptualise and contextualise clearly in both temporal and intellectual terms the sources and ideas to which you’re referring, and adjust your verb forms accordingly. Among the most troublesome of verb forms in English is the infinitive. In most languages, the infinitive of a verb is a single word: the famous Latin phrase ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), for instance, becomes ‘venire, videre, vincere’ using the infinitive forms. In English, however, the infinitives of verbs are formed through the addition of ‘to’ – ‘to come, to see, to conquer’ – and the two elements of the infinitive (‘to’ and ‘conquer’) should no sooner be separated from each other than should the ‘-ire’ or ‘-ere’ ending be separated from the stem of one of the Latin infinitives. There are those, of course, who claim that splitting English infinitives is no longer a concern – even that such fussing over verbs is tantamount to splitting hairs – but I’ve seen papers returned for revision by the editors of scholarly journals with the specific request to remove or reword all split infinitives, and rightly so. Split infinitives are incorrect grammar and simply not an aspect of formal academic or scientific prose. However, split infinitives are also all around us daily in our speech and informal written communications, on our radio and television programmes (Startrek’s ‘to boldly go’ is the most famous or infamous, depending on your perspective) and even where we might least expect to find them. Check out, for instance, the descriptive paragraph about Journal Citation Reports on the Thomson Reuters web site, which claims that the Reports offer ‘a systematic, objective means to critically PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk