Remeis English Checklist

The Remeis English Checklist

(by J. Wilms and K. Pottschmidt)

First of all and most importantly:

• did you read the instructions to authors of the journal? If you are working on a thesis, did you read those of Astronomy and Astrophysics on language and the TeX instructions in file aadoc.pdf, which is part of the Astronomy and Astrophysics package?
• did you read appendix A of the instructions to authors of Rev Mod Phys?

Punctuation

• did you remove all commas before "that"?
• did you end your footnotes and captions with a full stop (".")?
• did you make sure that your use of "data" is correct and uses plural verbs?
• did you make sure that you do not have a ":" anywhere before an equation, but that your equations are seen as part of your sentences?
• did you make sure that you have commas surrounding "i.e." and "e.g."?

Spelling and Word usage

• do you consistently use either British or American spelling?
• did you run a spell checker over your manuscript? For TeX, use "ispell" or the built in spell checker in emacs.
• did you make sure not to use country prefixes in addresses in the author list?
• did you avoid passive voice as much as possible?
• did you make sure that you are //not// using "The found results are..." and similar German constructs in your text?
• did you make sure that everything in your text that is not your original result is accompanied by proper citations?
• did you make sure that you distinguish between "estimate" and "estimation" by replacing all "estimation" with "estimate"?
• did you replace all uses of "exemplary" by "example"?
• did you replace all uses of "dependency" by "dependence"?
• did you use "short" for length intervals and "brief" for time intervals? (but note that "short of duration" is correct)
• did you replace all uses of "the actual value" by "the real value"? (if you are German, "actual" does not mean "aktuell"!)
• did you remove all uses of "hence" and "thereby"?
• did you make sure that you use "however" as sparingly as possible?
• did you make sure that you did not use "the equation reads..", but rather used "the equation is..." or "the equation is given by..."?
• did you avoid split infinitives? ("to boldly go..." is wrong; yes, in many cases split infinitives are ok in current English, but they tend to be so often used wrongly by non-native speakers that it is best to avoid them)
• did you make sure that you distinguish properly between "this" and "these"?
• did you make use of the "Oxford comma", i.e., do you have a comma before "and" in lists?
• did you use "i.e." and "e.g." correctly, i.e., using "i.e." for a specific clarification or definition and "e.g." where you would otherwise use "for example"?
• did you use the IAU recommended year - month - day sequences (2016 March 15)?
• did you make sure that you did not use contractions such as "didn't" or "you're"?
• did you replace "cf." with "see" everywhere since you know that "cf." means "compare"?
• did you ensure that you use "opportunity" where in German you would be using "Chance" or "Gelegenheit" (and did not use "chance"...)?
• did you make sure that the reader will understand what thing you refer to when using "it" rather than naming it?
• did you make sure that all uses of "this" are followed by the object you are referring to?
• did you use "led" rather than "lead" when using the past tense of the verb "to lead"?
• did you reread the manuscript for internal consistency after you added comments from your coauthors?
• did you make sure that your sentences are short (rule of thumb: if a sentence goes over more than three lines it is probably too long)?
• did you check that you did not combine two sentences that could be separate sentences with "and"?
• did you avoid abbreviations as much as possible and only used them when they are really, really common (HST, AGN, XMM,...)?
• did you check that you defined all abbreviations that you used at their first usage? ("...Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN)..." //not// "...AGN (Active Galactic Nucleus)..." )

Citations

• did you add the journal to all publications where you list the arXiv-reference and not just blindly copy the erroneous ADS bibtex entry?
• did you make sure that you distinguished between arXiv references where a paper is submitted and references where a paper is already accepted by checking the paper author's comment on the arXiv-page for that article?
• did you remove the page number for all ATEL-references downloaded from ADS and changed the journal name to "Astron. Tel." or "ATEL"? (and similar for IAU telegrams)
• did you add editors and the title of the conference publication to all conference publications?
• did you add the publisher and place information (city only) to all books, conference publications, and other book-like publications that you are citing?
• did you check that your references are correct in that you are using \citet{biblabel} for references in the text and \citep{biblabel} for references in parentheses?
• did you make sure that none of your \citet{..} commands refer to more than one biblabel?
• [added by O. Koenig: did you make sure all SPIE references have an address? (you may want to follow this procedure: go to NASA ADS to get bibtex entry (@inproceedings!), put the entry of "booktitle" into "series", put booktitle = procspie (there should be a @STRING{procspie = "Proc. SPIE."} in mnemonic.bib, go to the SPIE webpage of the paper, get the address, and insert it by hand. A MWE could be @INPROCEEDINGS{Doehring2015a, author = {{D{\"o}hring}, T. and {...}, title = "{The challenge of developing thin mirror shells for future x-ray telescopes}", series = {Optical Systems Design 2015: Optical Fabrication, Testing, and Metrology V}, year = 2015, editor = {{Duparr}, A. and {Geyl}, R.}, booktitle = procspie, volume = {9628}, address = {Jena, Germany}, pages = {962809}})]

Typesetting (mainly in TeX)

• did you check for missing spaces between values and units?
• did you make sure that all scientific units are typeset in \mathrm?
• did you make sure not to use constructs such as $\mathrm{m}/\mathrm{s}$ by using $\mathrm{m}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}$ instead?
• did you make sure that almost all of your error bars are rounded up to only one significant digit rather than following the DIN-norm (which is not applied in astronomical journals)?
• did you make sure that you are not using any positioning commands for the table or figure environment such as \begin{table}[htpb]?
• did you make sure that your tables have captions above the table, and figures have captions below the figure or next to it (where allowed by the style)?
• did you make sure that you use empty lines to denote the start of a new paragraph rather than the \\-command? (use \parindent{0pt} if you do not want to indent paragraphs)
• did you make sure that there are no paragraph endings above or below \begin{equation}...\end{equation} by ensuring that there is no empty line above or below the equation-environment?
• did you make sure that you are not using $\frac{a}{b}$ in normal text, but use $a/b$ instead?
• did you make sure that you are not using the displaymath-environment and that all equations are numbered?
• did you make sure that all of your sections, subsections, paragraphs and so on are numbered?
• did you avoid any and all uses of \bf, \it, \sl, or \em and use the proper commands \textbf, \textit, \textsl, and \emph instead?
• did you use the en-dash of TeX for ranges, even if they occur in math, by using -- in text mode rather than a minus sign? (that is, did you typeset a range in an equation as $3x$--$5x$ or $3x\mbox{--}5x$ rather than, erroneously, $3x-5x$?
• did you correctly use the minus-sign and dashes in astronomical source names, where the name contains coordinates and the dash really is a southern declination or Galactic latitude, that is, did you typeset Her X-1, LMC X-3, but GX\,339$-$4 or IGR J16318$-$4848 (and as a really difficult one: MCG$-$6-30-15)?
  • as a side note: When the first part of the source name is a constellation name (e.g., Her X-1) it should be followed by a full space (~), while if the first part of the source name is a catalog (GX, 4U, 2RXS), it should be followed by a half-space (\,).
• did you make sure to typeset hydrogen equivalent columns as $N_\mathrm{H}$ rather than $n_H$ or $n_\mathrm{H}$? (note: in astronomy, $n$ denotes a particle density, so it has units of particles per cubic centimeter, while N is a column with units of particles per square centimeter; a certain analysis program uses nH for this parameter, but this does not mean that n should be used in papers).