I'm sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don't usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll:
Please note that the writing of papers is a classical phenomenon, and thus you may choose only one of these options.
My default answer, for the record, is the first choice. This is because my grad school training involved writing exclusively for Physical Review journals, and that's what they need. A lot of our stuff went into Phys. Rev. Letters, too, which has a strict requirement that the whole thing must fit into four journal pages, which means that you aggressively "et al." long author lists to save space.
This causes me some trouble whenever I write for a journal with a different citation format, as I habitually only write down the first author and starting page. When the journal I'm sending something to wants the end page and the title, I have to dig back through photocopies and PDF's to find that information, which is kind of annoying.
Yes, I know, there are citation management programs like Mendeley that would do this for me. One of these days, I'll get organized enough for that.
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Hm. Pretty much all the journals that I routinely read and submit to use the format:
Names of All Authors, (year) "Paper Title", _Journal_Title_, Vol #, No. #, pp. x-y
with citations in the text of the form (First Author Last Name, et al., year)
So that's what I use.
I've seen a number of different formats. Most of the journals I have dealt with want titles, so I am in the habit of recording them. The leading journals in my subfield want a full author list if it is reasonably short (though beyond 8-10 names they will accept I. M. First et al.), and just a starting page. Other journals want page ranges, or will insist on three or five authors before you insert the "et al."
Then there is the increasingly popular DOI. APS did this one right: if your paper is J. Abbr. Phys., volume 123, page 456, then the DOI will be 10.1103/JAbbrPhys.123.456 (the part before the slash identifies APS as the publisher). Most other publishers assign Seekrit Codes which may have some meaning to the publisher but no connection to anything a human can easily understand. I have seen such formats as 1.234567 or 2000ZZ123456 (the first four digits correspond to a year, but it's the submission year, not the publication year) or WHISK-EYTAN-GOFOX-TROT. The system is useful for tracking down references in some journals that your library subscribes to and the publisher has set up the web site properly (APS and AIP are among the good guys here), but doesn't help if your library doesn't subscribe to that journal or if the publisher hides the paper behind a paywall even if you are coming from an IP address associated with your university (yeah, I'm talking to you, AAAS, and you, Nature Publishing Group, among others).
Wouldn't "& al. be better then?
All citations should consist of a link to the doi.
Can I put in a plea for the title: for those of us without access to most journals, it makes quite a difference to the ease with which we can track down preprints, author website copies, etc, should these exist.
Truncating long author lists is OK, though.
DOI
Every journal that I use (in chemistry) has a single volume # for a given year (with maybe a separate issue #) meaning pure redundancy. I say get rid of them. They're a relic.
Every single journal and granting agency has different styles and requirements.
I would not be able to write without Endnote.
And I would never know what labs anything came out of if I didn't have the full author lists. Papers is my friend.
NASA ADS + bibtex?
Authors. Year. Title. JournalName. Volume:startpage-endpage.
Authors can be truncated to et al. above some number, but it is important to me as a reader to know who wrote the paper being cited. Journal Name should not be abbreviated in any way. Yes, you know what Phys. Rev. Lett. stands for, but I might not. (Physics? Physiology? Physiotheraphy? ...). In my field, people routinely cite, within a single publication, papers from a wide range of biological, mathematical, physical, geological, chemical, social, and other kinds of sciences.
The title is critical, and I hate journals that leave it out. I want to know what the paper is about before I make the effort to track it down.
Starting and ending pages are needed if you have to request photocopies from the library.
DOI codes are indeed a nightmare. The rate of errors in typing them must be huge. Plus, does anyone know the correct way to hyphenate them when they must be broken across lines?
The references are a communication to the reader. They should be designed that way.
As FuturePostdoc said, this sort of thing is really what Bibtex is for. You have a file that contains every possibly relevant bit of info about each reference (title, journal name, authors, publisher, etc, etc) then you have Bibtex format all your references in the text and reference list for you. Need a new format? No problem, takes no more than a minute or two to fix.
Plus, does anyone know the correct way to hyphenate [DOIs] when they must be broken across lines?
Since some publishers include hyphens in the DOI string, do not use a hyphen. You can break a line between the "doi:" (or whatever your journal uses to signify that a DOI follows) and the actual code (if you are using LaTeX, the command to do this is \discretionary{}{}{}). Try not to break in mid-code (I have not yet been forced to do so), but if you can't avoid it, my guess would be to break it after the slash.
NASA ADS + bibtex?
Caution: For journals which use paper numbers instead of page numbers (this includes APS, AIP, and AGU journals), the "page" field in the ADS BibTeX entries is not reliable. Most commonly, leading zeros disappear, but initial letters in AGU journals also get dropped. Double check before you actually use it.
Every journal that I use (in chemistry) has a single volume # for a given year (with maybe a separate issue #) meaning pure redundancy.
Do papers in your field never cite articles in Science or Nature? Those journals run four volumes per year. Physical Review Letters, which also might show up in reference lists in some subfields of chemistry, runs two volumes per year. I know of journals, among them Astrophysical Journal, that increment the volume number monthly. So the volume number is not redundant.
This is all so silly. In theoretical particle physics, one really needs a combination of the above. The experimental papers have hundreds, if not thousands, of authors, so the first name with an et al is, er, the most reasonable option. But theory paper usually only have a few authors, and the convention is to list them alphabetically, so all names should be listed. Then, a paper may also contain references to astrophysical papers, which have an entirely different convention ...
SInce Applied Physics Letters is my field's journal of choice, I go: all authors, journal, volume, page and year. (All authors is important because you generally recognize groups by the PI.)
IEEE journals are the only ones I've ever submitted to that require the paper title, and their formatting invariably gets the capitalization wrong. A lot of journals automatically link to the DOI in their PDFs â isn't that what I'm paying an obscene amount of money for?
No one has mentioned the most important part: arxiv numbers.
If <3 authors, then all authors names, fist LNF, rest normal European order, else, first author LNF followed by et al. Then Journal name (or acceptable contraction), volume, page range, year.