In scientific writing, what is the protocol for shortening nouns?
I often see place or species names shortened in scientific journal articles and would like to know what the correct protocol is.
Can I shorten "Gough Island" to just "Gough"? Or "leatherback turtle" to "leatherback"?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46527. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Typically, if we are going to introduce any shorthand for a long name (including initializing it), the first time we use it in full and then note the shorter name we will use throughout: This can just be the shortened name in parentheses if no worded explanation is needed; (xxx) implies "hereinafter xxxx". Or it can be an actual sentence to introduce it.
Examples:
The experiments took place on Gough Island (Gough),
The primary experiments were performed on leatherback turtles (leatherbacks),
The most time-consuming element of this computation is the third Hessenberg Factorization of the outer product. We call this the 'outer HF'.
Measuring the Inter-Element Coupling Factor (IECF) is the focus of our concern in this study,
0 comment threads
0 comment threads