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> For scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to meet the journal’s guidelines; if t

> For scientists submitting their papers to journals, there’s an all-too-familiar drill: spend hours formatting the paper to meet the journal’s guidelines; if the paper is rejected, sink more time into reformatting it for another journal; repeat. What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, spent zero time on formatting. edit: Nature's one appears to be https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-nature-latex-template/myxmhdsbzkyd https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/springer-nature-lat...

ftxbro 3y ago
> "What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that" Millions of dollars in time wasted on learning other markup language
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  I definitely don't know how to write latex, can muddle through anyway. Total loss to trial and error / searching bits of syntax is probably below an hour so far this lifetime.
light_hue_1 3y ago
> What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, spent zero time on formatting. Then you don't have much experience writing papers. Formatting is very time consuming. Some want 8 pages, some are unlimited, others want you to use whatever makes sense. Every journal has a different page length. They expect to see results in different places. Some want a detailed appendix. Others are ok with a website. The latex template doesn't help at all with any of these. Reformatting is extremely painful and wasteful.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Three in the real world, some number in undergrad. Writing papers takes a fair amount of time - think how to express things, producing graphs and so forth - but reordering sections or adding things to a bibliography is yet to cause much grief. Maybe we mean different things by formatting.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  The worst thing is references. They all have their own weird formats.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Why isn't that handled by semantic markup? That said, recognising static academic reference format, then reformatting for the other 4 or 5 standard formats seems like a python project for first year students (to this non-programmer, I'd guess there are lots of edge cases to trip on making it a great learning experience!)?
    - cge 3y ago
      It often isn't so much the actual bibliography line item format, which are usually handled quite well be systems like bibtex or biblatex+biber, but overall citation formatting complexities. Sometimes journals want specific formats that become a challenge to implement. For example, on a recent submission, we needed our main text to have a numbered bibliography at the end, then needed our methods to have numbered bibliography at the end, but with numbers starting after the last number in the main text, and no repeats, but with references in the methods to items already in the main text bibliography referring to those numbers. This was surprisingly difficult to implement reliably in LaTeX and Biblatex. An additional annoyance is that to save space, journals often want formats that are compact but inefficient to use, for example, formats that are heavily abbreviated and don't include titles. These, however, are annoying to use, and annoying reviewers is generally unwise. So in our case, we actually intentionally submit PDFs for review that use the 'wrong' bibliography item format, of a similar form to the journal's but less abbreviated and including titles and hyperlink backreferences to citations in the text. Then for final submission we have to replace this with the journal's preferred format.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Now that is a solved problem. The issues the grandparent post raises about rewriting the text to be shorter or longer are real, but changing to a totally different reference format is what Latex does automagically for you when you apply the publisher's template - I can't recall the last time when I even looked at what a publication's reference format is, I have the list of sources in bibtex and whatever their template outputs should be correct, and if something in the format was difficult to implement in Latex, well, that was their problem for whoever made that template back when they did it.
cge 3y ago
Nature accepts LaTeX+PDF submissions, and will send the PDF out for review, but for final submission after acceptance, they prefer mostly-unformatted Word files; if you submit a LaTeX+PDF final submission, they convert it to Word [1]. As they stress that authors should not bother working on the visual formatting of their final submissions, my expectation is that, internally, they then take the Word file and manually put it into their own typesetting system. Publishers like Dagstuhl Publishing that can require LaTeX submissions and use a completely LaTeX publishing workflow probably have significant efficiency advantages, but then rely on potential authors being sufficiently experienced with LaTeX that a LaTeX submission requirement doesn't drive people away. This can work well for computer science and some parts of physics, but for other fields it can be a significant burden. [1]: https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/final-submission https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/final-submission

ftxbro 3y ago

> "What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that" Millions of dollars in time wasted on learning other markup language

JonChesterfield 3y ago
I definitely don't know how to write latex, can muddle through anyway. Total loss to trial and error / searching bits of syntax is probably below an hour so far this lifetime.

light_hue_1 3y ago

> What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, spent zero time on formatting. Then you don't have much experience writing papers. Formatting is very time consuming. Some want 8 pages, some are unlimited, others want you to use whatever makes sense. Every journal has a different page length. They expect to see results in different places. Some want a detailed appendix. Others are ok with a website. The latex template doesn't help at all with any of these. Reformatting is extremely painful and wasteful.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Three in the real world, some number in undergrad. Writing papers takes a fair amount of time - think how to express things, producing graphs and so forth - but reordering sections or adding things to a bibliography is yet to cause much grief. Maybe we mean different things by formatting.
IshKebab 3y ago
The worst thing is references. They all have their own weird formats.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Why isn't that handled by semantic markup? That said, recognising static academic reference format, then reformatting for the other 4 or 5 standard formats seems like a python project for first year students (to this non-programmer, I'd guess there are lots of edge cases to trip on making it a great learning experience!)?
  - cge 3y ago
    It often isn't so much the actual bibliography line item format, which are usually handled quite well be systems like bibtex or biblatex+biber, but overall citation formatting complexities. Sometimes journals want specific formats that become a challenge to implement. For example, on a recent submission, we needed our main text to have a numbered bibliography at the end, then needed our methods to have numbered bibliography at the end, but with numbers starting after the last number in the main text, and no repeats, but with references in the methods to items already in the main text bibliography referring to those numbers. This was surprisingly difficult to implement reliably in LaTeX and Biblatex. An additional annoyance is that to save space, journals often want formats that are compact but inefficient to use, for example, formats that are heavily abbreviated and don't include titles. These, however, are annoying to use, and annoying reviewers is generally unwise. So in our case, we actually intentionally submit PDFs for review that use the 'wrong' bibliography item format, of a similar form to the journal's but less abbreviated and including titles and hyperlink backreferences to citations in the text. Then for final submission we have to replace this with the journal's preferred format.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Now that is a solved problem. The issues the grandparent post raises about rewriting the text to be shorter or longer are real, but changing to a totally different reference format is what Latex does automagically for you when you apply the publisher's template - I can't recall the last time when I even looked at what a publication's reference format is, I have the list of sources in bibtex and whatever their template outputs should be correct, and if something in the format was difficult to implement in Latex, well, that was their problem for whoever made that template back when they did it.

cge 3y ago

Nature accepts LaTeX+PDF submissions, and will send the PDF out for review, but for final submission after acceptance, they prefer mostly-unformatted Word files; if you submit a LaTeX+PDF final submission, they convert it to Word [1]. As they stress that authors should not bother working on the visual formatting of their final submissions, my expectation is that, internally, they then take the Word file and manually put it into their own typesetting system. Publishers like Dagstuhl Publishing that can require LaTeX submissions and use a completely LaTeX publishing workflow probably have significant efficiency advantages, but then rely on potential authors being sufficiently experienced with LaTeX that a LaTeX submission requirement doesn't drive people away. This can work well for computer science and some parts of physics, but for other fields it can be a significant burden. [1]: https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/final-submission https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/final-submission