Remeis English Checklist
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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?
- 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 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", putbooktitle = procspie
(there should be a@STRING{procspie = "Proc. SPIE."}
inmnemonic.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 typesetHer X-1
,LMC X-3
, butGX\,339$-$4
orIGR J16318$-$4848
(and as a really difficult one:MCG$-$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 (\,
).
- 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 (
- 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).