Article Writing for Journal Publications

We are in the business of generation of scientific knowledge and communication of such information to the scientific community at large is a essential part of this process. I end up repeating my commonly used rules for manuscript preparation and hence I am preparing this page as a resource point. The following is the list of 'my rules'.

• The abstract
  • A short paragraph containing a line about the problem statement and the current status.
  • Briefly mention your result highlights wby giving only and all highlights. End the abstract with why this paper should be read by the intended reader - ideally a broader audience
• Introduction - Should have three main paragraphs
  • What is the problem statement and why is it important ?
  • What is the current state of the art and what is the gap
  • What have you done that you want to communicate. It should typically begin with here, we have ...
• Results - This is the place to just mention the results. Do not go about explaining or discussing
  • Go over your results in a logical fashion
  • Each figure should have explanation about how it should be viewed and what should be reader know from the figure
  • minimize tables as much as possible
• Discussions - Here you do not present new results but talk about what central idea ties all your results. You can have newer figures to drive your idea.
• Conclusions/Summary - there is a subtle difference between conclusion and summary. Summary just lists out crucial points of you paper, while conclusion derives something out of the results and discussion.

Rules and Regulations for manuscript corrections

• Prepare the manuscript in a journal neutral format
• Version the revisions - name the files properly with version number as well as the last modified author initials
• Use microsoft word. Track comments. Do not delete them - but just resolve them. If it gets too loaded, let me delete them after its completely resolved.
• Use the Word referencing system. Its inbuilt and the easiest.
• Place the figure as close as possible to the first reference. All texts in the figure should be visible and readable.
• Maintain the same font and sizes through out.
• Maintain a figures.ppt for each manuscript. Each figure in the manuscript should be a slide in the ppt. Save the figure as .png from ppt and import this into word.

Managing bibiography for manuscripts

• Download and use a free software called jabRef
• make a library for each paper. Get the proper reference from google scholar or from the journal webpage and have a collection of all references for a paper in JabRef
• Export the references to a file called Sources.xml
• In a windows system, this file should be copied into C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Bibliography\sources.xml. In a mac system, this must be copied into ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office
• Once the sources file is upto date, then go to references tab in Word, click on citation and at the bottom right corner, click on citation source manager.
• As the page opens up, it will have to load all your references on the left column. You import all the citations into the right column by selecting all
• Now go to the place where you wnt the reference and then insert the citation
• Word has very limited bibliography styles. If you need more sophisticated styles, then you need to have a specific .XSL file. A few styles are hosted here https://github.com/codingo/BibWord
• Copy these files in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\1033\Bibliography\Style for windows and in mac: /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/Resources/Style