Helpful Tips on Formatting Journal Articles by Observing the Guidelines

Helpful Tips on Formatting Journal Articles by Observing the Guidelines
All academic and scientific journals have author guidelines of some kind specifying the format and style that should be used in articles submitted to them. Some guidelines are very specific indeed, leaving little to be decided by the author, while others are more vague, allowing the author a good deal of leeway in choosing the formats and styles used in his or her paper. Whatever the guidelines of the journal to which you are planning to submit your paper may be, they should be examined with extreme care and followed to the letter. As insignificant as such details may seem in comparison with the content or written style of an article, they are important to the journal, and formatting is a highly visible aspect of academic and scientific writing, so errors will be immediately apparent to that all-important editor who considers your work for publication.

It is essential, for instance, that any word limits indicated for an article as a whole and for any of its individual sections, such as the abstract, be observed. Some guidelines provide different word limits for different kinds of papers, so make sure that you are consulting the correct requirements for your article. While many editors will not be put off by a good paper that slightly exceeds word counts, and such a minor discrepancy can in any case be sorted out during final editing, a journal that wants papers of approximately 10,000 words will not be keen to receive papers of 20,000 words, and an abstract that should be 300 words should not run to 500. Another major concern is the referencing style used by the journal. If, for example, a journal’s guidelines call for author–date references, submitting a paper that uses numerical references is a recipe for rejection, or at the very least considerable revision. Some guidelines will include specific instructions for formatting titles, headings and subheadings, which are particularly conspicuous elements of an article, so they are not the place for compromises. Keywords, numbers, capitalisation and special fonts may also need to be used in specific ways, and tables and figures frequently require special attention, with the ways in which they should be labelled, formatted, referred to and positioned in the paper often specified in guidelines. Finally, watch for instructions indicating that figures and large tables should be presented in separate files or files of particular kinds, as this, too, is common.

Articles can be rejected without their content ever being considered simply because they are not correctly formatted, and giving an overworked editor a reason to reject your work is never a good idea. As a general rule, the more you can do to meet the journal’s requirements with precision, the better the chances that your paper will be greeted with a positive attitude and receive the serious attention it deserves.