Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

Formatting advice everyone should know

Filed under: Academia/Research — Daniel Lemire @ 15:50

I just finished reviewing, as an editor, some of the camera-ready papers for CSWWS 2006. Here are some rules everyone ought to know:

  • When citing papers, do not use multiple brackets (such as [1][2][3]), use a single one (such as [1,2,3]).
  • Typically, we abbreviate see “Figure 10″ to “see Fig. 10″, but never, never, do we abbreviate “see Table 10″ to “see Tab. 10″.
  • Your abstract should be self-contained: no reference to a footnote or to your reference section should be made in the abstract.
  • Non-breakable spaces are your friends. Under Word, you can get a non-breakable space as [ctrl][space]. Use them before most references such as “Fig.{non-breakable}10″ and “as in{non-breakable}[1]“.
  • Don’t use bitmap images unless you know what you are doing. If you are using bitmap images, turn off the compression. I know the image looks fine on your screen, but high quality printing and bitmap diagrams don’t mix.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, if you don’t follow these rules, people will notice and your paper will get lower reviews and fewer citations.

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