Journal abbreviations - How to cite the references - Preparing the text

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

Journal abbreviations
How to cite the references
Preparing the text

Although journal styles vary widely, one aspect of reference citation has been standardized: abbreviations of journal names. As the result of widespread adoption of a standard (American National Standards Institute 1969), almost all major journals and secondary services now use the same system of abbreviation. Previously, most journals abbreviated journal names (significant printing expense can be avoided by abbreviation), but there was no uniformity. The Journal of the American Chemical Society was variously abbreviated to “J. Amer. Chem. Soc.,” “Jour. Am. Chem. Soc.,” “J.A.C.S.,” and so forth. These differing systems posed problems for authors and publishers alike. Now there is essentially only one system, and it is uniform. The word “Journal” is now always abbreviated “J.” (Some journals omit the periods after the abbreviations.) By noting a few of these standard rules, authors can abbreviate many journal titles, even unfamiliar ones, without referring to a source list. It is helpful to know, for example, that all “ology” words are abbreviated at the “l.” (“Bacteriology” is abbreviated “Bacteriol.,” “Physiology” is abbreviated “Physiol.,” etc.) Thus, if one memorizes the abbreviations of words commonly used in titles, most journal titles can be abbreviated with ease. An exception to remember is that one-word titles (such as Science and Biochemistry) are never abbreviated.

Appendix 1 lists the abbreviations for commonly used words in periodical titles. If you are unsure how to abbreviate a journal title, you can often discern the correct abbreviation from a listing in a bibliographic database, from information in the journal, or from a previous citation of the journal. Abbreviations for the titles of many journals in the biomedical sciences and related fields can be obtained from the PubMed journals database (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/journals).