Hello there,
I have a question regardig the author instructions/submission guidelines of journals and I hope someone here can provide me with some insights!
In the last weeks I was reading many different author instructions of different journals in order to check the reference style they use.
In many cases I have noticed that the reference style actually used by a journal differs from the style given in the reference instructions of that journal.
Sometimes the differences are small like that the actual style uses italicized journal names, while the author instrcutions recommend non italicized. Or "et al." is used actually for more that 10 authors while the instrucions tell to use it for more than six.Sometimes issue numbers are not requested, but the journal uses them in the references of published articles generally. Or the journal name section is terminated by a period in the instructions, in the published articles not.
But sometimes the differences are really blatant.
So I came across several instances where the actual used style is totally different from the style given in the instructions. So it might be that the journal now uses a kind of NIH/NLM Vancouver, while the instructions use some kind of APA style, with totally different punctuation etc. When looking back in the article history I often found that the style of the author instructions was used several yers ago and changed then. But the instructions did not.
When I noticed how common this is, I really was bluffed and I still am. I wonder how this can be and why the journals dont seem to be interested in keeping their guidelines up to date. I am not familiar with publshing workflows but I imagine that outdated author instructions for referencinf lead to tons of wrong formatted submissions, which have to be reformatted either by the author or by the journal editors/typesetters. I think this lead to extra efford and costs ( or nervs of the authors) that could easily be avoided.
As said, I am not familiar with workflows of journals. Maybe the references are reformatted anyway while the journal production, at least at big publishers like Elsevier or Wiley, but I don`t know.
Often journals explicitly say that the submissions have to be formatted exactly like the instructions recommend. But they use a totally differnt style.
I really would love to know why and how it comes to this discrepancy and why journals obviously do not feel the need to do something against this.
Maybe someone here can tell me, that would be great!!
Thanks and byebye
Peter