Reviews of Modern Physics Style Guide Contents D. Use of the colon 15 E. Use of the apostrophe 15 I. Introduction 3 F. Use of exclamation points and italics 16 A. Note on LATEX 3 B. Note on REVTEX 3 XIV. Abbreviations and Acronyms 16 II. Preliminary Matter 3 XV. Units 16 A. Document header 3 B. Begin Document 4 XVI. Mathematical Material 17 C. Title 4 A. Characters 17 D. Author(s) and Affiliation(s) 4 1. Character fonts 17 E. Abstract 4 2. Diacritical signs 17 F. \maketitle 4 3. Subscripts and superscripts 17 G. Table of Contents 4 B. Abbreviations in math 18 1. Abbreviations designating mathematical III. Section Headings 5 functions 18 A. First subheading 5 2. Abbreviations in subscripts and superscripts 18 1. Second subheading 5 C. Mathematical expressions 18 1. When to display 18 IV. Numbering of Figures, Tables, and Equations 5 2. Punctuation 19 A. Figure numbering 5 3. Equation breaking (multilinear equations) 19 B. Table numbering 5 4. Equation numbering, special situations 19 C. Equation numbering 6 D. Bracketing 19 1. Grouping sequence 19 V. Acknowledgments 6 2. Specific bracket notation 19 VI. Lists of symbols and/or acronyms 6 3. Specialized bracket notation 20 E. Additional style guidelines 20 VII. Appendices 6 1. Placement of limits and indices 20 2. Fractions 20 VIII. Supplemental Material not in Appendices 7 3. Multiplication signs 20 4. Mathematical terms 20 IX. Style of References 7 5. Radical signs and overbars 20 A. Citations in the text 7 B. Citations in footnotes 7 XVII. The Production File 21 C. Format of full reference entries 7 1. Journal articles 8 APPENDIX A: WRITING A BETTER 2. Russian journal articles with English journal SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE 22 translations 8 A. Elements of good style for everyone 22 3. Books 8 1. Active and passive voices 22 4. ConferenceREVIEW proceedings 8 COPY2. Economy 23 5. Theses, preprints, and other references 9 3. Forward momentum 23 D. Order of reference list 9 4. Inviting the reader in 24 E. Use BIBTEX for references 10 5. Hedging 24 6. Dropping names: abbreviations and acronyms 25 X. Footnotes 10 7. Time travel: the mixed-tenses syndrome 25 A. Introductory footnotes 10 8. Contrast and variety 25 B. Textual foonotes 10 9. Grammar 26 C. Notes in tables and figure captions 11 10. Frequently misused words and expressions 27 11. Being concrete 28 XI. Tables 11 12. Choosing a title 29 A. Table sizes 11 B. Elements of style for non-native writers of English 29 B. Table captions 11 1. Past tense and present perfect 29 C. Lines and space in tables 12 2. Plurals in singular dress 29 D. Headings within tables 12 NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION3. Placing the verb early in the sentence 30 XII. Figures 12 4. Placement of adverbs 30 A. Designing and labeling figures 12 5. Nouns as modifiers 31 B. Identifying figures 13 6. Articles 31 C. Figure captions 13 7. Describing figures 32 8. Participles and infinitives 32 XIII. Punctuation 14 9. Covering two possibilities 32 A. Hyphenation 14 10. Omitting “it” 32 B. Use of the comma 14 11. Frequently misused words and expressions 32 C. Use of parentheses 15 C. Conclusion 35 Reviews of Modern Physics Style Guide 2 APPENDIX B: JOURNAL TITLE ABBREVIATIONS 36 References 44 Reviews of Modern Physics Style Guide 3 I. INTRODUCTION tific authors prepare professional-looking publications. It gives the author detailed control over the appearance of This guide is intended to help authors who are prepar- equations and other features of document design. The ing manuscripts for Reviews of Modern Physics. Both the LATEX language has also proven useful for expressing editorial staff and the production staff appreciate your equations in email messages. There are many good books effort to follow our style. It will help us to get your arti- and tutorials for getting started with LATEX. Since this cle posted and printed efficiently and, by eliminating the Style Guide is not intended as a LATEX manual, authors need for keyboarding, will support better accuracy. new to LATEX are urged to consult the primary litera- The emphasis here will be on preparation using LATEX ture.2 along with the REVTEX style package written for RMP, which is available on the web page B. Note on REVT X http://rmp.aps.org/info/infoRMP.html E REVT X is a set of macros designed by the American Use of LATEX and the REVTEX macro package makes E it possible for your file to be readily converted to our Physical Society to be used in conjunction with LATEX. compositor’s system, XML, from which proofs can be It enables authors to select the particular APS journal to generated and an online version created, with hyperlinks which they are submitting a paper and to have features to the references. Reviews of Modern Physics can also like fonts, headings, math formatting, and references au- handle submissions in Microsoft Word 1. However, for tomatically generated in the preferred style of that jour- this format the editorial process – both refereeing and nal. REVTEX is periodically updated. The version in production – will take somewhat longer. use as this Style Guide is revised is REVTEX 4.1 (patch We shall focus here on the features of RMP style, giv- level 2). This collection of macros, as well as helpful ing some of the rationale behind them, and offering mod- documentation about it, can be found at els, examples of the LATEX commands, and advice on preparing tables, figures, and equations. If you are not http://publish.aps.org/revtex/ using LATEX you may still find the models, as well as the two appendices, useful. Appendix A is a short paper, Support for REVTEX is available at [email protected]. “Writing a Better Scientific Article,” with a special sub- When addressing questions to REVTEX Support, be sure section intended for authors whose first language is not to mention which journal you are preparing your article English. Appendix B is a list of journal names with their for, as RMP style differs in several respects from that of standard abbreviations for use in references. the Physical Review journals. When your article is ready, send the manuscript file to [email protected], or upload it to the electronic submissions site II. PRELIMINARY MATTER https://authors.aps.org/Submissions/login/new. For purposes of refereeing, we prefer that the initial submis- Begin your text file with a document preamble con- sion be as a PDF file with two columns per page and sisting of header, list of options, and the command figures embedded. After the article is accepted, we will begin document . ask you to prepare a production version of the file with \ { } the figures commented out. More will be said about this version later. Detailed submission instructions can be found at http://rmp.aps.org/authors/detailed- A. Document header information-authors-rmp. We look forward to receiving your article. A LATEX file for RMP must begin with the following statement: A. Note on LATEX documentclass[rmp,aps,¡options¿] revtex4-1 \ { } LATEX is a document-creation system developed by the The options may include reprint, endfloats, American Mathematical Society in 1985 to help scien- nofootinbib, or other options available to users of REVTEX. Use of BIBTEX is not indicated here; BIBTEX is a separate entity. The use of BIBTEX is described in Sec. IX.E of this guide. 1 Submissions created in MS Word must use the Microsoft Equa- tion Editor or MathType for both displayed equations and math in the text. Even when this is done, we have found some MS Word documents problematic. To enhance your chances of hav- 2 ing your Word source file used in production, please observe the See, for example, L. Lamport, 1994, LATEX: A Document Prepa- guidelines posted at http://rmp.aps.org/info/word.html ration System (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts). Reviews of Modern Physics Style Guide 4 B. Begin Document affiliation Bartol Research Institute, University of Delaware,\ Newark,{ Delaware 19716, USA After the documentclass statement, you will likely } have a few instances\ of the optional statements such as which displays as usepackage (with which you load packages for handling graphics\ and special features) and possibly newcommand P.T. Wilson and Y. Jiang (with which you can define shortcuts for\ commonly Department of Physics, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA used mathematical expressions). Consult REVTEX and O.A. Aktsipetrov LATEX2ε documentation for details. The next statement that is required, however, is Department of Physics, Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia and begin document Bartol Research Institute, University of Delaware, \ { } Newark, Delaware 19716, USA There is a matching command to be placed at the end of the entire file: Note that multiple authors from the same institution are listed in separate author statements. Additional in- end document \ \ { } formation such as email addresses, alternate affiliations, and the like are given in footnotes. For email, spec- ify “Electronic address,” e.g., email Electronic address: C. Title [email protected] . \ { } There is a 10-word limit on the titles of RMP arti- cles. Nonstandard abbreviations and acronyms are not E. Abstract allowed. Both these rules are to encourage accessibility and reader friendliness. Words are suggested in place of The abstract should be a concise summary of the sub- greek symbols in titles to facilitate posting them in html. jects treated in the paper. It will be used as a basis for in- Give the title of your document in the title state- \ dexing and will also be published separately from the ar- ment in curly brackets, for example, ticle in at least one abstract journal.