Scientific writing is an integral aspect of research. When writing reports, manuscripts, proposals, or even working notes, the following guidelines must be followed.

Document Titles

For all documents that are associated with a specific date (like a conference abstract or presentation, personal statement for a fellowship application, etc – anything that has a deadline), use the following naming convention.

YYYY_MM_DD_NameOfDocument
YYYY_MM_DD_NameOfDocument_Yourlastname

where YYYY is the year, MM is the two-digit month, and DD is the two-digit day corresponding to the effective date of the document. When possible, try to name your document consistently with other similar documents. Only provide your last name if this document is unique to you, not when you are working on a collaborative document.

For all in-progress manuscripts, please use the following naming convention:

PaperDescriptiveTitleOfPaper

No spaces, title case, start with the word “Paper.” This helps enforce uniformity across all group papers. When the paper has been accepted, change the name to the date-specific format.

Never include version numbers in document titles. All documents should be under some form of revision control: either Overleaf, GitHub, or Google Docs. Do not ever use Word or LibreOffice for any group work, and never send a document by email.

Templates

Always use official group templates for any group-related project.

Writing Style

Scientific writing is professional, formal, and succinct. The following are some guidelines and checks to ensure that your writing meets these standards.

  • Use a spell checker and always proof read for grammar and sentence structure. Try reading your text out loud to ensure that it flows coherently.
  • Avoid all colloquialisms, figures of speech, and idioms. For instance, a phrase such as “A’s work is pretty much the same as B’s” should be replaced with “The works of A and B are similar.”
  • Never include a direct quote from a reference; you should always paraphrase instead.
  • Define acronyms the first time they are used, and then use them consistently throughout the work.
  • Equations should be treated as words and should be used with proper punctuation. For instance: “We see that integrating a quadratic from 0 to 1 gives $$\int_0^1x^2\,dx = \frac{1}{3},$$ where the result is a rational number.”
  • References to figures should not be treated as nouns. For instance, the sentence “The results are shown in Figure 3 and have excellent agreement” should be “The results were shown to have excellent agreement (Figure 3)”

LaTeX Formatting

All professional writing is done in LaTeX, either on Overleaf or on your own computer. Please adhere to the following standards when writing LaTeX:

  • Use one sentence per line in the LaTeX source. Paragraphs are seperated by a blank line. This makes it easier to track changes.
  • Always use labels and references to refer to tables, figures, sections, equations, etc. For instance, each figure should contain a caption and a figure,
\begin{figure}
   \includegraphics{figures/myexamplefigure.pdf}
   \caption{This is my example figure}
\label{fig:myexamplefigure}

and can be referenced using the ref command:

The results are shown to match closely. (Figure~\ref{fig:myexamplefigure})
  • Use fig:name_of_figure, tab:name_of_table, eq:name_of_equation, and sec:name_of_section for all labels.

BibTeX

BibTeX is used to manage all citations. Use the Google Scholar convention for all BibTeX entries: every BibTeX entry should be copied from the Google Scholar citation link. The general convention is lastnameYYYYfirstword This will ensure that there is no duplication of references.

Acceptable BibTeX handles:

smith1995analyzing
gras2018new
yi2019fluid

Unacceptasble BibTeX handles:

Smith1995
gras-2018-new
FluidMechanicsYi2019
etc

Scientific Posters

For guidance on designing scientific posters, check out this guide from Caltech.