Science Writing

Every community has standards and expectations surrounding how members of that community communicate with one another

You already understand how to change how you communicate based upon your audience; for instance, the words/style you use to write an email to your professor are different than when you send a text message to a friend. If we consider a journal a "community", then the journal's formatting guidelines indicate what these standards and expectations are. These can include:

• whether active or passive voice is preferred
• the scope of the journal (i.e. what topics does the journal publish about)
• what style guidelines does the journal use (punctuation, citation, etc.)
• which peer review process do they use
• copyright information - who will own the published work? 

You will find this information on the journal's about or information for authors pages. You will also get better at formatting the way a particular journal prefers by reading lots of articles published by that journal. At Cougar JUGR, we follow the Nature formatting guide. 

Submit your paper to Cougar JUGR