Please Keep Those References Consistent!

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

This post regards formatting references consistently.

Several years ago I received a manuscript that contained a terrible reference list. Almost every reference was in a different format.

In some references, the authors’ names included full given names; in others, there were initials instead. In some references, every main word in the article title was capitalized; in others, only the first word and proper nouns were capitalized.

In some references, journal titles were written out in full; in others, they were abbreviated. Page ranges were in various formats (along the lines of "324–329" and "324–9"). The punctuation of references varied too.

Did the authors of the manuscript just copy references from other reference lists? Or were the authors just very careless? Whatever the reason, this reference list was a mess!

Most manuscripts have reference lists that are much better than that one. However, many manuscripts’ reference lists include some inconsistencies of types noted above.

Of course, all references in a manuscript should follow the format required by the journal to which the manuscript is being submitted. (Items need not, as some authors seem to believe, be the format used by the journal where the cited articles originally appeared.)

Reference management software can help put references into the required formats for journals. Formatting references without such software tends to take more time. However, the time is well spent.

Please make sure that references are consistently in the format required by the target journal. Doing so can facilitate publishing a paper.

Until the next post—

Barbara