Shaping Scientifc Authorship in the Twentieth Century
Instructions for Contributors to Journals
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55283/jhk.23127Keywords:
academic publishing, 20th century, scientific journals, authorship, codes of conductAbstract
“Notes to contributors” and “author guidelines” will be a familiar genre for most readers of this journal. These documents help editors and publishers to shape the behavior of scientific authors by laying down rules about the use of symbols and units, the formatting of bibliographic references, the structure and language of the article text, and the presentation of supporting images or tables. These documents were not, however, common features of academic publishing before the twentieth century, but they emerged during a period of growth and internationalization of the scientific community. A change in tone by the 1970s reflects a shift from collegial and collaborative efforts to publish research, to a world in which editors wielded both the threat of rejection and demands for payments. Very few of these instruction documents attempted to help novice authors by demystifying the publishing or peer review processes. Rather, they trained researchers to prepare typescripts that editors and typesetters could process efficiently, they helped to inculcate standard practices around the use of nomenclature, units and abbreviations within international disciplinary communities, and they began to make explicit certain norms of research conduct around authorship, collaboration and publishing practices.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Aileen Fyfe
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Leverhulme Trust
Grant numbers MRF-2021-061
