Publishing your Research Article: Science and Engineering : Format your Manuscript

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Format your Manuscript

Publishers and funders often require that your manuscript follow formatting guidelines. This page provides the following resources to make the formatting process more efficient and comply with requirements:

Authoring tools
Citation management tools
Acknowledgements resources

Authoring Tools

Many journals will provide templates for formatting your article. Be sure to check if there is a template to follow, and use the template. There are a variety of tools available to help you with formatting text, data, and code. Here are some commonly used authoring tools:

Authorea
A powerful publishing platform for articles, data, figures, preprints.
Jupyter Notebook
The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
LaTex
LaTeX is free software under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL).
Overleaf
Overleaf is an online collaborative writing and publishing tool for scientific documents. Overleaf provides a LaTeX editor, real-time collaboration, and the fully compiled output is produced automatically in the background as you type.
R Markdown
Turn your analyses into high quality documents, reports, presentations and dashboards.

Citation Managers

Citation Managers such as EndNote, EndNote Basic, Mendeley, or Zotero are software tools for managing your citations. Citation Managers will help you:

Create and organize a personal research database
Download citations from online databases
Format bibliographies and citations in papers
Share your citations with others

Acknowledgements

It is customary and often required to include an acknowledgement section (or equivalent) in a research article. Many journals will provide guidelines for the acknowledgement section.

This source provides a good overview of what goes into an acknowledgement, along with examples.

Acknowledgements Examples for an Academic Research Paper (journalpublishing.com))

Funders will often have requirements for funding acknowledgements. For example, here are requirements from a few common funders of scientific research:

DOE (Department of Energy)
Requirement for Acknowledgement of Federal Support from DOE
NIH (National Institutes of Health)
Requirements for Acknowledging NIH-Supported Research
NSF - Post Award Requirements
Chapter VI - Other Post Award Requirements and Considerations (See section E Part 4a - Grantee Obligations)

NOTE: In addition to your direct funding, be sure to acknowledge all grants associated with your paper, including all equipment or lab services used for your research. In order to be discoverable, this information must go into the acknowledgement section, and must include the associated grant number(s). Research core and shared facility managers need reliable measures of impact to report to funders and improve competitiveness for future grants. Some UW-Madison Research Cores provide an acknowledgement statement on their website that you can use. If no statement, is provided, you can reach out to the facility for acknowledgement language and grant numbers.