The Case for Journal Style Guides

Abstract

Style guides. I’ve spent the better part of my 28-year career conceiving, constructing, and curating them—and although I’ve formed some strong opinions about what makes a good guide, the more I work with them, the more I realize there isn’t one, perfect formula. The one thing I do know, though, is that an in-house style guide is an indispensable element of any journal that aspires to achieve consistent, coherent presentation while publishing high-quality content. Let me be clear: I’m not necessarily advocating for an in-house guide alone. Indeed, most journals subscribe to at least one of the major style manuals. Whether it be ACS (The ACS Style Guide), AMA (AMA Manual of Style), Chicago (The Chicago Manual of Style), CSE (Scientific Style and Format), or any combination of these and/or other references, it’s wise to defer to a higher order; doing so establishes a firm, widely known standard that manuscript editors are more likely to know and that authors are more likely to accept when their precious prose has been undone. Furthermore, because these manuals are cited so prevalently within the scientific journal community, to endorse them is to demonstrate that your organization is an invested member of that community. All of this being the case, you may very well ask: Why, then, do I need an in-house style guide? Making the Case Questioning the necessity of an in-house guide is understandable given the considerable breadth of the aforementioned manuals. Regardless of how strictly a general manual is followed, however, […]