Best Practice: Match different Journal specifications

Question

In most cases one does not write papers for one journal exclusively. Changing your code to match all specifications takes a lot of afford and time. There is a wide variety of question referring to this topic

• Is there a unifying package for different editors styles
• Converters between formats in different journals

Going through the comments it looks pretty hopeless to find »One Package To Rule Them All«. Licences and changing templates make it nearly impossible to maintain all of those templates in one class or package.

Point is, are there some sort best practices to save time writing articles for different journals?

Answer 1

(A journal copy editor speaking.)

Basically, no, there is not much you can do. There have been ideas (nothing got to the final stage AFAIK) of providing a uniform way to input all metadata, so that the headers (everything until first \section of the article) looks the same for all journals. However, I doubt journal publishers would accept this sort of input; for one, I would not.

So, the provided system had to convert the input file into a new LaTeX file which looks as needed by the journal. This itself is not that much a problem (basically, it's just a data manipulator). However, developing such system and making people learn it is probably more work than simply modifying the file according to an example file provided by the publisher.

We also need not forget that some journal classes use different than standard macros for various necessary stuff, such as theorem environments in Springer classes. This makes any such efforts far from complete and useful.

To conclude, as of December 2015, no such system exists, to the best of my knowledge.

Answer 2

Yes, there are best practices. On this side of the pond, I would say that the secret is:

Macros, macros, macros.

On 't other, I would say:

It's macros, stupid.

As the comments on the (at time of writing) other answer, no-one is going to do it for you but there are things you can do to make life easier for yourself. Many years ago, I developed a system to make my life easier with journals. It was predicated on the following concepts:

1. When actually writing an article, it's highly unlikely that I'll know which journal I'll submit it to.

2. When actually writing an article, it's important that the writing not get in the way of the ideas so I want to use my own macros which make my life easiest.

3. Once the article is at the stage at which I want to submit it, I may need to put it in the journal's style at time of submission but I don't want to spend too much time doing that because experience says that the submit-wait-wait-wait-reject cycle will be repeated several times per article. Also, the arXiv is included in this as it generally has old versions of packages.

4. I'm quite likely to submit to the same journal more than once, so devising a system that works for specific journals is worthwhile.

5. Once an article is accepted, I'd be happy to do whatever modifications are needed to make it fit but only then.

So I wrote my own class which was a wrapper for all the journal classes that I've ever submitted to. There's only a certain amount of information that the journals need in the preamble although they are infinitely inventive in how they ask for it (some of them seem to go out of their way to make it complicated - the one that used \obeylines was my personal ... favourite). So storing it all in macros and then doling it out as required is a solvable problem.

Similarly, there generally are only a limited number of things that journal style files define. Some mathematical operators, some theorem environments, and not much more. So again, a few macros to provide wrappers between how I want to write my articles and how journals want them is a solvable problem.

So a typical article starts:

\documentclass[%
a4paper,%
%lms,% <-- this class has options for the various journals I've submitted to
%draft,%
defaults,%
]{myclass}

\usepackage[%
bb,%
geom,%
%track,%
]%
{mymacros}

\theoremstyle{\myrmkstyle} % <-- the remark style is set by my macro package
\providetheorem{examples}[theorem]{Examples}

\mytitle{%
  % <- Title will go in here
}

\myshorttitle{%
  % <- Short title here
}

\mydate{\today}

\mysubjclass{% <- AMS Subject classes
}

\myauthor{%
  % <- Me!
}

\myaddress{%
  % <- Address
}

\myemail{%
  % <- Bet you can't guess this one
}
\myurl{%
  % <- Or this one
}

\myabstract{%
  % Abstracts get handled variously so we store it here first
}

\mybibliographystyle % <- The actual style will generally be set in the class file

\begin{document}

\mymaketitle % <- Puts all that junk in the right place in the document

Multiple authors are specified simply by adding more details. Each \myauthor triggers a new author and all following information pertains to the last named author.

Anyway, the point of it all is that I don't have to think about the journal when writing the article. I can just cut-and-paste from one article to another and change what needs changing.

Inside the myclass.cls file is a lot of hackery (and pretty awful hackery at that - I wrote it before this site existed) which puts the information in the right place (the complementary mymacros.sty tends to handle stuff like defining operators). It also handles loading packages according to the class - some journals' class files load things like amsmath and some don't so the class has a system for automatically loading packages. It can take a bit of time to figure out all that needs to go in this middle layer when I add a new journal, but generally at that stage of writing an article I'm quite happy to have a task like that to do. And as I said, it's rare that I'd submit to a journal only once so it's a time saver in the long run.

Answer 3

Authorea lets you write your entire article in a non-specific format.

Once you are finished (or whenever you want) you can select among lots of different journals to generate your .tex or even the final pdf.

You can also upload your own .tex template file or load it from a number of other services (Overleaf, Sharelatex).

You can use the service for free (one private article and unlimited public articles).