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Q&A

In scientific writing, what is the protocol for shortening nouns?

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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"?

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This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/46527. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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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,

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