Each academic journal tends to have a pretty unique formatting style. This individuality makes authors loose uncountable hours preparing manuscripts (even with the advent of Reference managers) and makes the number of formatting mistakes higher as there is virtually no rule that is followed by all journals. What are the advantages of this system?
There are no advantages whatsoever. The different formats have a cause but don't seem to have a purpose. It's just the consequence of different publishers having different tastes, or even different editorial decisions within the same publisher. It would be easier for us to have a standard format, but I don't know how to implement such a thing. Having to choose one type of format would need to have pretty convincing criteria to make all other publishers/journals adopt it. And in the end maybe some things are just a matter of taste, and no argument would be able to make some journals change. Maybe some type of incentive would work... like an integrated article submission system that would receive all article submissions in the same format and direct them to an appropriate journal, releasing some of the burden from editorial boards that have to reject out-of-scope papers. Either that or free ice-cream.
Of course, it would be great for researchers if all journals would use the same style: basically, they need the same information about cited sources, anyway (with a few exceptions: e.g. authors' first names vs initials). For some journals, maybe it is just a part of their identity that they use a specific style while some have also changed the style. Nowadays, most editors and reviewers check if the authors have followed the right style, and if they do not, they can reject the paper, so, maybe, it is for them a way to get rid of some papers (their logic is: if the authors do not follow the right style, then they are maybe trying to submit something that was rejected from elsewhere or they do not respect the journal enough).
I wish there was a logical answer to this, but since there isn't, I built a logical solution: Typeset (see attached link). So, you simply write your paper and copy paste it to Typeset, choose the journal you want to format it for and it will do the formatting automatically in seconds. Took us a lot of engineering know-how to get this done. Would love it if you guys checked it out. We've got scientists from NASA, CERN, ETH Zurich using it.
https://www.typeset.io
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