Academic Manuscript Odds and Ends Checklist

Before submitting a manuscript, check to make sure you haven't made these common errors. This will give reviewers less to nitpick and decrease their potential frustration.

1. Check your in-text citations

• Ensure that they are in alphabetical order (i.e. the numbers in the brackets increase as they are listed)

  • For example: [1,5,11] instead of [5,1,11]

2. Check your figures

• Make sure you reference all parts of all figures in the body text

  • Figures should appear in the order they are referenced

• Parts of a figure should be labeled in alphabetical order of their appearance in the text

  • For example, 1a should be referenced first, followed by 1b. Modify the ordering of the text or the lettering of the figure to ensure this.

3. Check your references

Citation managers can often make mistakes importing references. Some things to check are:

• Are all author names spelled correctly?

  • Don't forget umlauts and other accents

• Are Latin names italicized in titles?

• Are the DOIs included? Are they displaying correctly or is the https:// bit displaying twice?

• Are page numbers, volume number, and issue number all included?

• Are there URLs displaying in addition to the DOI? Omit these to save space.

• Consider using the ISO 4 standard journal title abbreviations to save space.

Make sure to also modify your citation manager entries accordingly to save time later.