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December 06, 2014

Using LaTeX for a paper for Science Advances

I recently wrote a paper for the new AAAS journal Science Advances using LaTeX (as opposed to their Microsoft Word template), and have some things to share with others interested in sending their beautifully typeset work to that journal. [1]

First, Science Advances uses a bibliography style that is slightly different from that of Science, which means that the Science.bst file available from AAAS for submissions to Science is not suitable. Specifically, Science Advances wants full titles to be listed and wants full page ranges (rather than just the first page). My reading of the detailed information for authors suggests that these are the only differences. Here is a modified version of the Science.bst file, called ScienceAdvances.bst, that conforms to the required bibliographic style. [2]

Second, Science Advances uses a slightly different format for the manuscript itself than Science, and so again, the existing LaTeX template is not quite suitable. One difference is that Science Advances requires section headings. Here is a zip file containing a Science Advances LaTeX template, modified from the Science template distributed by AAAS, that you can use (note: this zip includes the bst file listed above). [2]

Finally, there are a few little things that make Science Advances different from Science. SA has a much longer (effective) length limit, being 15,000 words compared to Science's 4500 words. The Reference list in SA is comprehensive, meaning that references cited only in the Supplementary Material should be included in the main text's reference list. There is also no limit on the number of references (compared to Science's limit of 40). And, SA places the acknowledgements after the Reference section, and the acknowledgements include information about funding, contributions, and conflicts of interest. Otherwise, the overall emphasis on articles being of broad interest across the sciences and of being written in plain English [3] remains the same as Science.

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[1] Full disclosure: I am currently serving as an Associate Editor for Science Advances. Adapting Science's LaTeX files to Science Advances's requirements, and sharing them online, was not a part of my duties as an AE.

[2] The files are provided as-is, with no guarantees. They compile for me, which was good enough at the time.

[3] Of course, biology articles in Science are hardly written in "plain English", so there is definitely some degree of a double-standard at AAAS for biology vs. non-biology articles. Often, it seems that biology, and particularly molecular biology, can be written in dense jargon, while non-biology, but especially anything with mathematical concepts or quantities in it, has to be written without jargon. This is almost surely related to the fact that the majority of articles published in Science (apparently by design) are biomedical in nature. AAAS is claiming that Science Advances will be different, having a broader scope and a greater representation of non-biomedical articles (for instance, SA specifically says it wants articles from the social sciences, the computer sciences, and engineering, which I think is a really great stance). Whether they can pull that off remains to be seen, since they need to get the buy-in from the best people in these other fields to send their high-quality work to SA rather than to disciplinary venues.

posted December 6, 2014 03:15 PM in Simply Academic | permalink

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