[HN Gopher] Cost of 'reformatting' prompts a call for journals t...
___________________________________________________________________
Cost of 'reformatting' prompts a call for journals to change their
requirements
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-06-08 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Ekaros wrote:
| Should this be exactly where the journals have paid editors to do
| the busy work to match the output they want? Shouldn't there be
| some standard light format to slap the text and images and
| possibly references(hardest part) and then editors would take
| care of the rest?
| LanceH wrote:
| Billions wasted pursuing publication over meaningful effort.
| ftxbro wrote:
| how will they know you're good if you don't have good metrics
| in Science and Nature
| Lk7Of3vfJS2n wrote:
| By creating something they couldn't.
| somat wrote:
| Publication is the results. The effort is meaningless if no one
| knows about it.
|
| https://gwern.net/maze
|
| Yes but what about all this unnecessary gatekeeping?
| gatekeeping is necessary to maintain a certain level of
| quality. On this specific issue of formatting gatekeeping.
| There was no conspiracy. I imagine that the policy solidified
| over time. The paper wants to maintain a specific look. Authors
| are upset when changes get introduced while formatting. The
| paper then says "you can format it yourself if it meets our
| specification". Now you have to format it yourself.
|
| Thankfully in our web enabled era there a ways to publish
| without going through a traditional publisher. However you will
| note that the quality of these publishers is a mixed bag, real
| science right next to quackery. No one has done the gatekeeping
| needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Publication is the results. > The paper wants to maintain a
| specific look.
|
| Which does the paper want more? To be the first with the
| results or to appear a particular way? Do the appearances
| help with "the results?"
| somat wrote:
| First is usually not a huge worry. There are times where
| you are competing with someone else in the same field and
| want to be first. But most of the time you are just hoping
| someone is interested enough to get additional funding to
| peruse the project. The researcher wants their results
| published via the most respected publisher possible. The
| publisher wants to increase their respect(and desirability)
| by picking the most respectable results. If the researcher
| is unable to to get published by the ideal respectable
| source they will have to settle with a less respectful
| source.
|
| How much does having a consistent "look" lend itself to the
| perceived professionalism and respect a journal has?
|
| Scattered additional thoughts on desirability of publishing
| platforms. * Self publish(and hope you are
| famous enough to get noticed) * Publishing company
| that does little to no checking of papers. * open web
| based publishing. * corporate researcher, all
| published results stay in corporate library.
| seydor wrote:
| Ultimately pursuing grants
| Solvency wrote:
| [flagged]
| londont wrote:
| That's literally one of the reasons I quit my PhD
| d--b wrote:
| > the authors of the analysis, which was published in BBC
| Medicine on 10 May, propose that journals should allow free-
| format submissions so researchers can spend their time and money
| on research instead.
|
| Yeah right.
|
| This is YC though.
|
| Up-for-grabs: Untapped $260m market for reformatting scientific
| papers.
| gammarator wrote:
| There's rich irony in this article appearing in Nature, which has
| some of the most unusual and restrictive formatting requirements.
|
| Also, journal publication fees dwarf the implicit cost of
| reformatting and deliver arguably less value.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Perhaps this is true in the field discussed in the essay, but in
| my field (a natural science) formatting is taken care of with
| latex stylesheets, so the effort of switching to another journal
| format usually amounts to changing a few lines. Of course there
| can be small details such as whether a given journal wants
| keywords, but dealing with such things doesn't take much time.
|
| The problem of switching to another journal is also overplayed in
| the essay, at least in my field. I don't know of many people who
| "shop" for journals to accept their work. Usually you know the
| right journal, and if the paper is rejected you just give up on
| it. Perhaps this is discipline-specific, though. (The essay is
| restricted to biomedical fields.)
|
| As a reviewer, I've never spent any time on journal rules. If the
| paper gets accepted, it's up to the technical editor to impose
| rules.
|
| Most authors employ the proper latex stylesheets from the first
| rough draft. They also use section headings that fit the
| journal's conventions, and so forth.
|
| I suppose it is possible that people in biomedical fields (are
| there any here on HN?) tend to submit to multiple journals before
| their work is accepted. But I sort of doubt that reviewers reject
| papers based on things like italics or citation formatting, so if
| folks are submitting to a lot of journals, maybe their work just
| isn't highly regarded by their peers.
|
| Basically there is no issue here, at least in my field. It's an
| unconvincing essay, and not one that encouraged me to waste time
| looking up the original work.
| jltsiren wrote:
| > Perhaps this is true in the field discussed in the essay, but
| in my field (a natural science) formatting is taken care of
| with latex stylesheets, so the effort of switching to another
| journal format usually amounts to changing a few lines.
|
| That doesn't sound like the LaTeX I use. When you switch to
| another stylesheet, it often changes key dimensions such as
| page size and the number of columns. Then you have to reformat
| and possibly even redesign the figures, tables, equations,
| pseudocode, and so on. And it's quite likely that some packages
| you are using don't work properly with the new stylesheet, or
| even don't work at all, so you get some weird issues to debug.
|
| But that's about the technical layout, which isn't the concern
| here, as the publisher is usually responsible for that. In
| biomedical fields, manuscripts are usually just Word documents
| with some basic formatting. The real issue is that different
| journals have different ideas about the length, content, and
| structure of the paper. When you switch to another journal, the
| paper itself often needs a major revision.
| rowanc1 wrote:
| One possibility is to use a tool like MyST Markdown, which
| can export to many different LaTeX templates, or create a
| website.
|
| https://myst-tools.org/docs/mystjs/creating-pdf-documents
|
| Then the switching of templates actually is one line. There
| is also hope to get a bit further in the publishers system
| (which ultimately needs JATS XML), because MyST can also
| export to JATS (which is used for pubmed etc.).
| ricksunny wrote:
| >(are there any here on HN?)
|
| While I'm not slinging manuscriots left & rught, my coauthor
| and I got the below linked one into Frontiers last year. The
| reviewers' feedback was all based on the substance. The formst
| we had submitted was Google Docs printed to PDF. There might
| have been a standard Frontiers template or font choice I
| started from from the outset, I can't remember but I definitely
| wasn't using their standard reference format in-line in the
| manuscript, as doing so would have made some sections and
| tables nigh-on unreadable for the reviewers without a lot of
| formatting effort.
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphar.2022.9099...
| ketzu wrote:
| In my CS field, it is common to submit to different conferences
| at least if a paper gets rejected (because rejections can be
| very superficial). Fitting for a new conference template often
| also imposes rewrites, because of different length
| requirements, changes in length in the new latex template,
| different accessibility support (e.g., image descriptions in
| acm) and many more subtle changes. It was a major pain for me.
| Conferences especially have this problem because they lack
| major revisions and instead reject. But they are the goto way
| of publishing.
|
| The journals I interacted with were less of a problem, as they
| just handed out major revisions. The only rejection I remember
| was with a recommendation for a more fitting journal.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| In my CS subfield we use latex, but switching journals still
| tends to be a huge pain, as many use extremely brittle
| templates that can easily create incompatibilities and make the
| paper not compile if you don't spend considerable amounts of
| time debugging after making the change. In addition, different
| journals have different length limits, word limits, structural
| requirements, one vs. two column (which may make your figures
| overflow), what goes in the main text vs. supplementary
| material, bibliography format changes that sometimes are only
| partially handled by bibtex, etc., so basically what the post
| says. At least, ChatGPT seems to be very good at cutting text
| to try and fit length limits.
|
| And no one gives up with a paper, although this might have more
| to do with location than discipline (the academic evaluation
| system in my country is _heavily_ metrics-based, having indexed
| papers is what makes or breaks careers). People resubmit and
| resubmit and resubmit, typically to venues with a progressively
| lower bar, until the paper is accepted.
|
| In CS we also have competitive conference publications and, at
| least in my subfield, they don't have these problems to such a
| great extent as journals (as at least their latex templates
| tend to be decent, and some of them have the same length
| limits). One of the reasons why I prefer conference to journal
| publications.
| physPop wrote:
| It's a huge issue in most fields. No one uses latex anymore
| outside of niches like math and physics.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Wait, math and physics are niche?
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| [flagged]
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| >No one uses latex anymore
|
| Not true. IEEE, one of the largest professional orgs, accepts
| Latex. So does ACM, a huge comp sci org. I'm not familiar
| with others, but wouldn't be surprised if many others still
| accept Latex.
| eddieh wrote:
| Depends on the specific publication/conference within the
| org. ACM accepts LaTeX or Word. I always write in LaTeX,
| but got a paper accepted to an ACM conference that wanted
| Word and my beautiful photo ready paper got borked in the
| final print. I guess there is significant interest in
| authoring ACM papers in Word[0].
|
| [0] https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Aiaa, aaai, many others follow as well. Its ubiquitous.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| How many IEEE papers are submitted using the latex
| template? I wonder, because word-style formatting can be
| spotted in several of their papers.
|
| Latex is a giant pain to use - and i say this as someone
| who still uses it to write scientific articles. Services
| like overleaf exist but that is sometimes not an option
| with proprietary work.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Roboticist here: we use it.
|
| Aerospace generally does too.
|
| Computer vision seems to.
|
| In fact I think most tech related journals do, iirc.
| ashton314 wrote:
| CS PhD student here. Everyone uses LaTeX.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Well, we should go back to that, or something that is easier.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I've been shilling https://typst.app/ to anyone who will
| listen (and some who won't), it's great.
|
| There are still missing features compared to latex, but
| what exists seems so much more intuitive.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| [deleted]
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| It seems to be on github with an Apache license
| (https://github.com/typst/typst). Is there a catch I'm
| not seeing?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| He's probably upset that the online editor is closed
| source. Personally I think that's a reasonable
| monetization strategy long term.
| pbasista wrote:
| > No one uses latex anymore
|
| That is a very broad statement. Do you have any data to back
| it up?
|
| Do you suggest that it was used in the past but that has
| changed? If so, why?
| lower wrote:
| I've spent so much time for pointless reformatting. With Springer
| LNCS it's often that you have to work really hard to cram
| everything into the page limit. Then Springer does some editing
| in the bibliography, and the article then often overflows by one
| or two bibliography entries and is published like that, making
| the effort of meeting the page limit a complete waste time
| mixedmath wrote:
| There are a couple of journals in math that ask for the paper to
| be submitted using their particular latex template, and a typical
| latex template is incompatible with what I consider "standard"
| latex, i.e. either the `amsart` document class or `article`
| document class with certain AMS packages included.
|
| Sometimes it's small, like whether or not `\author{my name}`
| needs to be included in the preamble or in the main body. These
| are short but annoying. Sometimes it's very annoying. I'm glad
| that I've never tried to publish in a two-column journal (which
| might exist in math? I don't know) which would require more
| substantial superficial edits.
|
| I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of friction,
| slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage a certain
| sort of submission. I don't say I agree with this, but that's
| what I thought.
|
| This _sounds_ like the sort of problem that latex would be great
| at solving: changing the look of an article just by using
| different document classes. And sometimes it _is_ great --- but
| some templates are terrible, terrible, terrible. (And sometimes
| these terrible templates are for great journals! I see little to
| no correlation there).
| hinkley wrote:
| On one project I had someone trying to slow us down (we were
| making them look bad) with rules lawyering about our API docs.
| In the end I ended up prettying up our integration tests quite
| a bit, and using jcite to combine snippets of the integration
| tests with our inline documentation.
|
| I couldn't quite get it to the company standard, but I got it
| down to under an hour worth of work for our tech writer per
| release.
|
| In the end it was a week's work for me and it improved our
| integration tests. Not the constant draw on resources and
| sanity that I think someone was after.
| sh34r wrote:
| > I always assumed that this was a deliberate source of
| friction, slightly raising the bar of entry so as to discourage
| a certain sort of submission.
|
| There's no doubt in my mind that it's intentional gatekeeping.
| There's a reason why many papers are being "published" on Arxiv
| and foregoing all this boxticking.
|
| The whole publishing process is fundamentally broken. Aaron
| Swartz (RIP) had the right idea all along. Get rid of the
| middlemen sucking up millions of dollars by paywalling
| government funded research.
|
| It's been proven time and time again that a shocking number of
| studies can't be reproduced and that the traditional peer
| review process just isn't working. It's a good old boys' club
| putting a stamp of approval on their friends' work and keeping
| the outsiders away.
|
| When it comes to Math though, I do have some sympathies. There
| are so many cranks that think they solved Collatz or a
| millennium problem and don't even know what they don't know. It
| must be exhausting to sift through all that noise in a
| volunteer, unpaid position. These shibboleths might be a
| necessary evil.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > It's a good old boys' club putting a stamp of approval on
| their friends' work and keeping the outsiders away.
|
| > Math though, I do have some sympathies. There are so many
| cranks
|
| Lots of other fields have their cranks, quacks, fringe
| theorists, and whackjobs. Why give math special treatment?
| sh34r wrote:
| I think it's an asymmetric problem across areas of study.
| Including within math -- there aren't many amateurs who are
| going to try their hand at algebraic geometry, but number
| theory tends to be like catnip, because many wicked
| problems are very simple to state.
|
| Math is not so different from computer science in that it
| seems relatively approachable to a layperson. But there are
| relatively few mathematicians out there. That same level of
| spam is being filtered by much fewer people.
|
| To me, it's akin to why the Linux kernel devs operate the
| way they do. No GitHub issue page, no Slack, no Discord,
| banning topposting and web email providers. It's all based
| on old school mailing lists, because there's orders of
| magnitude more amateurs than kernel devs and they don't
| have time for handholding the unwashed masses.
|
| Anyway, I think there's some middle ground to be found
| between this extremely burdensome process to submit a paper
| for publishing, and making it as easy to publish as making
| a forum post...
| golergka wrote:
| ...do these academics not know how to use latex and waste their
| time in Microsoft Word?
| yawnxyz wrote:
| very few people use latex in biology
| ckemere wrote:
| So many comments about fonts, subscripts, etc. No one cares about
| that at review time. I've never heard anyone complain about
| significant time on this.
|
| Major difference in paper _style_ between Nature Brief
| Communication (2 figures, one page of text) and J Neuroscience
| full (10 pages and 8 figures). That's a big reformating. Also,
| Nature has a very specific abstract, which is great for a general
| science audience (https://www.nature.com/documents/nature-
| summary-paragraph.pd) but less so for specialists. Similarly, a
| clinical trial abstract has exact results so that it's easy to
| scrape. For the y-combinator audience, it seems obvious to me
| that a MobiCom and a ACM transactions will be very different
| papers.
|
| Fixing the format doesn't fix this.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It's unclear from the article if that's representative of either
| 1) Total time spent formatting or 2) The marginal increase in
| time spent formatting above what it would take to follow some
| other common format.
|
| #2 seems less likely, since, well, there isn't really a common
| format, as the article points out, so there's no default that
| researchers would use as a baseline.
|
| That leaves #1. But a paper has to be formatted _somehow_ , and
| that's always going to take time. So the $230M cost the article
| cites is going to be at least a little smaller when you take out
| the time it takes to write up anything at all using a consistent
| style and format, whether it's your own or something imposed on
| you.
|
| And I can tell you based on my own profession & day to day work,
| format & presentation is _extremely_ important in making it
| easier for your audience to consume information, and this is
| _especially_ true with complex or novel information.
|
| Undoubtedly the industry can and should do better. There should
| be common standards. It would smooth readability and
| comprehension. But it's not going to completely eliminate the
| rough $/hour equivalent this article is citing.
|
| Also consider that different fields will be conveying different
| types of information, or have audiences with different skillsets,
| so there's not a one-size-fits-all approach here. Style &
| formatting guidelines, even made as common as possible, will
| still by necessity be different in different disciplines.
| bombcar wrote:
| If papers are basically write-only, then it makes sense to reduce
| the effort required by the authors.
|
| But if they're meant to be consumed by an actual audience, it
| makes sense to make that part easier.
|
| If one author spending 10 hours reduces the amount 10,000 people
| need to read the paper by 10 minutes, that's a savings overall
| that is worth it.
| yunohn wrote:
| > reduces the amount 10,000 people need to read the paper
|
| Honestly, I'd wager most papers are read by a handful of people
| at best. Only the /most/ (top 1% or less) popular authors and
| papers get hundreds or thousands of real reads.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Is there still no widely adopted standardized submission format
| across all of science? That seems like a complete no-brainer,
| some structured text format that would allow the journals to
| render the articles as they see fit. Finally an application for
| XML:
|
| https://www.xml.com/articles/2018/10/12/introduction-jats/
| rowanc1 wrote:
| JATS is gaining adoption in publishing, but is difficult for
| scientists to actually _author_ in. This is one of the main
| reasons behind tools like MyST (https://myst-tools.org) and
| Quarto (https://quarto.org/) - both are semantic authoring
| tools that allow authors to export to JATS but author in
| Markdown (or in JupyterNotebooks).
|
| Having semantic authoring tools also means that you can easily
| change the template -- saving a ton of time for the author. For
| example, about 400 journal templates here: https://myst-
| tools.org/docs/mystjs/creating-pdf-documents
| thangalin wrote:
| KeenWrite Themes[1] are instructions that tell ConTeXt how to
| typeset XHTML documents (content) into PDF files (presentation).
| I made a tutorial[2] that shows how my FOSS desktop text editor,
| KeenWrite[3], allows users to write in Markdown to typeset a
| document against a particular theme.
|
| Before it can be used for scientific papers, KeenWrite (by way of
| a flexmark-java extension) needs cross-references, which,
| unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.
|
| I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to
| separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on
| TeX.SE[4] about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated
| items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast
| majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to
| tweak each list individually. The correct answer, IMO, is to fix
| the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual
| lists.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30
|
| [3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite
|
| [4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-
| be...
| prennert wrote:
| Even with LaTeX etc, content is not separate from presentation
| when you write papers. Once you have limits on pages, you have
| to adjust your content to the presentation to make it fit.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's not wasted - formatting things properly is incredibly useful
| as it allows for effective communication without researchers
| having to think of every possible ambiguity. The whole point of
| different journals existing is to allow people to publish to the
| ones that make sense for them, including the appropriate
| formatting. If you allow free-form submissions either you're
| going to need someone who is not familiar with the work to
| reformat it (and if it's more complicated than what a latex
| template can handle, it's probably not something you want a
| random editor doing either), or you publish things as they come
| in and wind up with a hodgepodge of poorly thought out
| formatting. Communicating is one of the most important parts of
| research, and researchers should be spending an appropriate
| amount of time on it.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| the formatting requirements between journals are wholly
| arbitrary and sometimes counter to each other. This is beyond
| merely communicating
| pornel wrote:
| You're all assuming it's about making papers pretty or fit a
| template, but the major time sink is length limits.
|
| The abstract has to have a specific number of chars or words
| (which varies by journal), and it's a critical part of the paper,
| so you never want to waste a single word. There's also limit for
| the total number of pages or words, which again needs text
| rewrites. Sometimes format of references is weird, and needs
| conversion macros or manual edits.
|
| Reviewers always want more information, more references, more
| tables, so publishing is an endless puzzle to fit all of that
| within limit that is always too short to fit everything you have
| to say.
|
| Having concise paper is of course great, but submitting to
| multiple places requires editing multiple variations, and that is
| busywork.
| gww wrote:
| The length limits also forces authors to increase the
| complexity of their figures to cram as much data into the
| limited space as possible. I've seen papers with figures that
| have 10+ graphs all squished into a half page figure.
|
| EDIT: This usually limits proper explanations of the data in
| the text too because of very limited word counts.
| boredemployee wrote:
| And we are living in times where productivity, tight deadlines
| are more and more common, inevitably people will use generative
| AI to fulfill idiotic and antiquated bureaucracies.
| qumpis wrote:
| Surely there's a benefit for the authors of doing so?
| Compressing information forces one to keep only the most
| important bits, presumably
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Our lab (phage therapy, plasmid therapy, AMR) spends a lot of
| time doing this kind of thing. So we're working on throwing the
| full weight of LLMs to help us fit things like length limits,
| format our citations properly, etc.
|
| Still a work in progress, since tiny context limit makes this so
| hard (I keep trying to get Claude access, including joining a
| Claude hackathon, but for some reason I never get access), but
| I'll be more than happy to share this thing for free so we can
| all go back to working on the science.
|
| As my PI says: "Science is not an exercise in creative writing"
| cratermoon wrote:
| Howard S. Becker <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chi
| cago/W/bo476743...> and Helen Sword <https://educational-
| innovation.sydney.edu.au/news/pdfs/Sword...> would both
| strongly disagree.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Please don't. When I don't understand what a human's written, I
| can often reverse-engineer it by considering what sorts of
| thoughts would lead to that word choice. That's next-to-
| impossible when reading the output of a transformer-based
| predictive text system.
|
| Science is not an exercise in creative writing, so write
| _straightforwardly_.
| axg11 wrote:
| Go one level deeper and you'll find the problem with all of
| academia (source: I have a PhD).
|
| Most of academic science as we know it today is structured so
| that the output is "publishable" and/or helps future grant
| applications. Incremental improvements are very publishable, but
| that doesn't necessarily make good science. Grants are awarded to
| scientists who are consistently able to deliver results, in the
| form of published papers. I can only really speak for my little
| corner of science, but from my view, the entire incentive
| structure of science is broken.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Incremental publication seems like a great idea. The only
| problem is that the publication process is so formal. But if we
| made publications as "blogs" or something, I think incremental
| units of forward progress are a reasonable way to do science. I
| suspect most science is done this way. I imagine there are few
| Wiles style FLT proofs around.
| seydor wrote:
| Ironic that this comes from nature.
|
| Do you remember which subscripts must be italicized?
| politician wrote:
| I just want to be able to read PDFs on my phone without fighting
| the two-column journal layout.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| As many people here write, with Latex, most of the technical
| issues are already resolved. A few other technical issues might
| arise due to Latex, but they are usually easy to deal with.
|
| However, what remains are rules on page limit, number of words or
| similar restrictions. And in most cases, you try to fit as much
| content as possible into the template. So when changing the
| template, you either have more or less space, so either you would
| want to add more content, or you need to remove content. Even
| with the same number of pages and other things being similar as
| well, due do small differences in the template, it will not match
| up. That is what takes effort.
|
| But for the aspect on space restrictions, I have heard actually
| the opposite argument: By having this limitation, you save the
| reading time of all your peers. Often, the work you did can
| actually be compressed into such short format. You might need to
| leave out some details (if you publish the source code and make
| it reproducible, people could anyway check for all details
| though, so not really a problem), but you can focus on the actual
| important part. So, by wasting some extra time and effort of the
| author, you save a lot of time and effort for all readers by
| having this restriction.
|
| If your work really does not fit the space limitations, maybe a
| different conference or journal would anyway be the better fit.
| heisenbit wrote:
| There is a natural length for content as there is for code. Too
| verbose and it is slowing you down. Too terse and the decoding
| stage gets painful.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Papers are already structured in a way that makes reading them
| very efficient, by providing different layers: you read the
| title, if you're interested you read the abstract, if you're
| still interested you read the intro, conclusions and maybe
| charts/tables, if you're _really_ interested you read the rest.
|
| I have the feeling that when my interest in a paper is enough
| to read everything, I might as well read a couple more pages if
| the paper is going to feel less crammed (often compression
| makes understanding harder). Although I might be
| underestimating the issue.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| > 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-lat...
| ftxbro wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The worst thing is references. They all have their own weird
| formats.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| 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.
| cge wrote:
| 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
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