How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

General principles
How and when to use abbreviations
Scientific style

Authors who use abbreviations extravagantly need to be restrained.

—Maeve O’Connor

General principles

Many experienced editors loathe abbreviations. Some would prefer that they not be used at all, except for standard units of measurement and their Système International (SI) prefixes, for which all scientific journals allow abbreviations. Many journals also allow, without definition, such standard abbreviations as etc., et al., i.e., and e.g. (The abbreviations i.e. and e.g. are often misused; properly used, i.e. means “that is,” whereas e.g. means “for example.” Because these abbreviations are so often misused or misinterpreted, we favor avoiding them.) In your own writing, you would be wise to keep abbreviations to a minimum. The editor will look more kindly on your paper, and the readers of your paper will bless you forever. More preaching on this point should not be necessary because, by now, you yourself have no doubt come across undefined and indecipherable abbreviations in the literature. Just remember how annoyed you felt when you were faced with these conundrums, and join with us now in a vow to never again pollute the scientific literature with an undefined abbreviation.

The “how to” of using abbreviations is easy because most journals use the same convention. When you plan to use an abbreviation, you introduce it by spelling out the word or term first, followed by the abbreviation within parentheses. The first sentence of the introduction of a paper might read: “Bacterial plasmids, as autonomously replicating deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules of modest size, are promising models for studying DNA replication and its control.”

The “when to” of using abbreviations is much more difficult. Several general guidelines might help.

First, generally do not use an abbreviation in the title of an article. Very few journals allow abbreviations in titles, and their use is strongly discouraged by the indexing and abstracting services. If the abbreviation is not standard, the literature retrieval services will have a difficult or impossible problem. Even if the abbreviation is standard, indexing and other problems arise. One major problem is that accepted abbreviations have a habit of changing; today’s abbreviations may be unrecognizable a few years from now. Comparison of certain abbreviations as listed in the various editions of the Council of Biology Editors Style Manual (which has now become Scientific Style and Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers) emphasizes this point. Dramatic changes occur when the terminology itself changes. Students today could have trouble with the abbreviation DPN (which stands for “diphosphopyridine nucleotide”) because the name itself has changed to “nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide,” the abbreviation for which is NAD.

Abbreviations should almost never be used in an abstract. Only if you use the same name, a long one, many times should you consider an abbreviation. If you use an abbreviation, you must define it at the first use in the abstract. Remember that the abstract will stand alone in whichever abstracting databases cover the journal in which your paper appears.

In the text itself, abbreviations may be used if a long word or phrase will appear repeatedly. They serve a purpose in reducing printing costs, by somewhat shortening the paper. More important, they aid the reader when they are used judiciously. Speaking of “important”: We are reminded of a man whose children sometimes refer to him as “the FIP” (fairly important person). They know that he hasn’t yet made it to VIP.