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I am submitting a paper to ACS Nano using the achemso package. However, even after using ancac3 document class optiion the bibliography always shows the full journal name. ACS Nano would like to have the journal names abbreviated. Anyway I can accomplish this?

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Abbreviating journal titles is something which it is not easy to achieve programmatically in a reliable way, as it needs a list of 'known' titles to work from. As such, achemso does not attempt to abbreviate the journal field. Tools such as JabRef do include the ability to search and replace full journal titles with the correct abbreviations.

At one point, I did explore some code to use a dictionary-based approach to abbreviate titles, but this is difficult to do reliably without some manual intervention. Thus it has never been included in release versions of achemso.

(Aside: biblatex with Biber does offer the possibility to do more complex field substitution, which could be used here. However, this is not at present a method which is sufficiently widely available to allow its use in achemso.)

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Thanks for your suggestions. I was in a rush, so for the moment I decided to manually abbreviate the journal names (in accordance with the CASSI, which is what the journal asks for) in my Bibdesk file. – NanoBuff Aug 1 '12 at 8:30
But I still don't appreciate the difficulty (this might have as much to do with my deep ignorance of LaTeX). The list of journals (especially the ones that chemists are wont to cite) is finite and 'known'. So is the unique abbreviation that each of them is assigned, so whats the problem? I think this is a huge bottleneck in achemso - since each journal needs its own bibliography format and this can be a severely limiting feature. – NanoBuff Aug 1 '12 at 8:40
@NanoBuff Every chemistry, physics and biology journal I know uses abbreviated names, and these are standard. Thus the usual approach is to use only the abbreviations in the .bib file: this is not journal dependent. As I say, the issue was getting things reliable enough to work, particularly with the requirement to work on the ACS servers (which do not have for example e-TeX). I can of course look at this again: there are a number of potential approaches. – Joseph Wright♦ Aug 1 '12 at 9:03

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