Dears,
I'm always surprised that why we are struggling to format papers in the respective journal reference format. Period, what is required is the scientific essence the paper is containing not the form of reference writing we have adopted.
Takele Taye Desta, good academic writing is good in all respects, which means that the conception and conduct of research, as well as all aspects of presenting it, are important. Getting referencing correct can be a pain in the neck, but it is simply part of what is required for high-quality publications.
I once saw a PhD candidate thanking his supervisor for teaching him to sweat the small stuff as well as the big stuff. In my view, that's a good point.
Dear Robert
My concern is, for example , if you submit a paper to a journal using APA format, and unfortunately , if the paper is not accepted and you are now planning to submit to another journal using Vancouver format, you have to kill your time in reformatting the paper for appearance of citations. Rather we have to spend our precious time in enhancing the scientific relevance of the paper.
Hello Takele,
I appreciate your problem. Would it help if you used an automated referencing system such as EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero? Some of those systems are free.
One of the problems is that sentences sometimes have to be massaged into a slightly different format, particularly when going from, say Harvard to Vancouver - or vice versa.
Every good wish!
Hello Takele Taye Desta
I agree with Robert Trevethan that using some of those software packages might make it more efficient, especially when the list is long and doing it all manually is long and painful!
Joseph C Lee, thank you for endorsing my post about referencing software. I should perhaps have added that, for my own work, I prefer to do referencing manually. Since I retired from academic life and took up editing, I have discovered that about half of my clients use an automated system - but, interestingly about half, like me, prefer to do their referencing manually.
As an editor of academic work, I have also been interested to find that the clients who use referencing software often have more errors in their referencing than do other clients. I suspect that's because the former group have not been encouraged to understand the "basics" of referencing.
I am preparing a website for my editing business on which I will place a document about referencing. I'll attach that document to this post. In it starting on page 6, I list 17 problems that I often find in my clients' use of APA referencing - and many of those problems occur despite a client using referencing software.
Dears,
I totally agree with the use of reference writing software. However, do we need to worry this much about reference style because I have not discovered its scientific importance. If the citation is consistent, no pelagarism, I recommend journals to accept any style of referencing .
This is a very good question.
I wonder what Wos and Scopus would say about it during their evaluation proces.
Indeed, both the questions and the answers are very good.
I would also like to mention the use of LaTeX in preparing manuscripts to avoid losing time for formatting either references or the manuscript body itself (as some journals tend to have very specific and conflicting requirements in this matter). While one needs to grasp at least some basics of the language, the reference / manuscript formatting can be readily changed (particularly if relying on readily available templates for the different journals) and by now most of the "big" publishers accept manuscripts prepared directly in LaTeX alongside those in .doc format.
In my opinion MORE IMPORTANT is the scientific content and its level, the correctness, proper discussion of the data, audience and impact of the results...for which spending time and efforts are very, very important...the reformatting of references is just a tedious but necessary work...
There is a free tool to check the style and duplication of references.
RefBerry checks your reference styles and duplicated reference just with one click and lets you know if your references comply with the selected style or not!
http://app.liboberry.com/
Takele Taye Desta Mihail Secu Tomasz Jarosz Liliana Brožič
It seems to me that to often we pay more attention on appearance instead on the content. At the end of the day we need to follow the publication house styles otherwise our article is not accepted. As an editor I need to follow guidelines from the databases with top indexing. The science became business and a competition. The race for top databases is unbelievable. Thank you Aliasghar-Karimi for the link.
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