Barrick Lab Style Guide

Writing a Scientific Paper

• Twenty Steps to Writing a Research Article (Tomorrow's Professor Mailing List Archive #1176)

General Formatting

• Use a single space after a period between sentences.
• Use 1/4" indentions to start new paragraphs.

Citations

• Use Mendeley to organize your citations and insert them into word processing documents.
• If you aren't formatting for submission to a specific journal, use the Nature Reviews Genetics style.
• To add italics to species names in downloaded citations, add HTML italics tags around them.
  • e.g. Escherichia coli to <i>Escherichia coli</i>
• You will generally need to manually correct the journal names from downloaded paper to their standard abbreviations.
  • e.g. Journal of Bacteriology to J. Bact.
  • Find the standard abbreviation using CAS or other resources.

Figures and Graphs

• Create Figures in a vector graphics program (e.g., Adobe Illustrator).
• Always include a legend for symbols within a figure, NOT just in the figure caption.
• Unlike the defaults in Microsoft Excel:
  • Enclose the data frame of a graph in a full box.
  • Generally, do not include any grid lines on graphs.
  • Do not use shadow effects.
• Use 95% confidence intervals, rather than standard deviations for error bars.

Symbols

Use Unicode symbols instead of symbol font. They work much better cross-platform. You can generally copy-paste from this website.

Main: Unicode Website | Search
Groups of symbols: Punctuation | Arrows | Math