Barrick Lab Style Guide
Writing a Scientific Paper
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
Topic revision: r3 - 2012-05-08 - 16:41:28 - Main.JeffreyBarrick