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

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: 

 

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. 

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

 

  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.