How to approach American English vs. British English spelling in a paper?

Question

I am currently writing a paper, for which my title and core problem is spelled differently in American and British English.

I don't worry about my professor preferring one way of writing over the other, as I'm not residing in an English-speaking country, but:

After all, my paper is being written in English, even it won't be published. Thus I wonder:

Is there a "standard procedure" for such cases, at least in US Ivy League universities or in certain citation styles? (I am currently using APA, 6th (our prof. didn't prescribe any specific citation style) as it suits my personal preference of how a reference should be cited and displayed.)

I will definitely mention both words in the "keywords" area, but other than that I will go with one spelling, namely the American English one. The word is "harmonization", if that should be important.

Sorry for my lack of initial research, I found this SE question though.

Answer 1

Whatever style guide your use, citations should be cited exactly in the original spelling. Doing otherwise would defeat the whole purpose of citation: uniquely identifying an existing publication.

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I could find no direct quote from APA to justify this (except that, well, they don't indicate that you have the liberty to edit the title of cited works!). However, multiple secondary sources make it clear, as for example:

Notes: Please "copy" the title of a book/an article/whatever (as far as the spelling of words such as "behavior"/"behavioral" are concerned) […] exactly as in the original.

Citation style guides tend to be more explicit for foreign language works, where most of them explicitly state (in some wording or another):

Give the original title, and, in brackets, the English translation

Answer 2

I typically don't worry about this question as a writer. For what it's worth, I'm based in the United States, so I default to American English. I always spell check my papers, but in the more than 25 papers that I've submitted, I've never gotten any feedback about using American spelling rather than British spelling; this question is very relevant for me since many of my papers are on graph colo(u)ring. It may be useful to note that in the journals that I submit to and read, I've seen both American and British spelling. (I think many editors typically let the authors choose which they prefer.)

So my suggestion is this: choose either American or British spelling and stay consistent throughout your paper. Don't lose any sleep over this. It will not be the deciding factor in whether your paper is accepted.

However, for doing a literature review, I feel your pain...

Answer 3

If your question were about the -our/-or distinction, or the -re/-er distinction, it would be a real question, but with -ise/-ize there's no contest: go with the Z form, as it's accepted on both sides of the Atlantic.

The International Organization for Standardization favours British spellings, and uses the -ize form. (This is known as Oxford Spelling.)

Answer 4

For references, F'x is correct: citations should be given in the spelling used in the original publication.

Beyond that, however, when writing the main text of your article for submission to a journal (or for any other work submitted to a professional publisher), you should follow the style guidelines they set out. Pretty much every journal should have a statement about which set of spellings they prefer (usually based on its country of origin).

For instance, the textbook I am using to teach a course this semester is written by Americans but published by Oxford, a UK publishing company. The word "center" is spelled "centre," and so on.

Answer 5

I think this is really a non-issue. Any decent search engine will return hits for your paper, even if one searches for harmonisation (the spelling more common in Britain) rather than harmonization (the spelling used in the USA, and also valid, though less common, in Britain) as long as a literal search isn't used.

Example search.

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I'm amending my answer to address the part of your question about whether specific journals require certain spellings. A Google search limited to the .edu domains finds lots of author guidelines that address this issue to various degrees, but nothing shows me that there's a single way to go.

Answer 6

One key factor would be who you main audience will be.

If I was writing an article to be released in Spain i would not write it in French.

If you are writing for mainly Americans then use American English, and the same goes for if it will mainly be for British then go for English.

If this is for all people who speak English then the correct one to use would be British English (which is known as just English, not British English), this is due to the fact that American English is simply at the most basic level a dialect of British English.

Also English comes from England not "Britain".

Answer 7

If the intent of the writer is clear and the content is clear, who cares? As long as the message is clear, the writer has performed his duty. I know this is a short putt, but, bottom line, communication rules. If you can't be understood, why bother to try to be understood?

Answer 8

The best thing is to pick and choose the sensible spellings from both dialects. I'm Canadian, but I refuse to write neighbour, a synthetic spelling which has a superfluous letter. On the other hand, the American spelling center (rather than centre) holds no advantage of brevity, and betrays only ignorance of the Latin root centrum in which tr aren't separated.

Regarding -sation endings versus -zation, these are a favored in a handful of languages like French, Dutch, German. However, not in others like Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Croatian, or Czech.

-sation is bad etymology. For instance the Online Etymology Dictionary gives us this for the word organization:

mid-15c., "act of organizing," from M.Fr. organisation and directly from M.L. organizationem (nom. organizatio), noun of action from pp. stem of organizare, from L. organum "instrument, organ" (see organ). Meaning "system, establishment" is from 1873. Organization man is from title of 1956 book by American sociologist William H. Whyte (1917-1999). Related: Organizational.

As you can see, the original Latin has a z. Since we don't gain any brevity, again, we should go with the spelling which respects etymology. In this case, it is the American one.

Forget borders: respect etymology and favor brevity, but do stop short of writing night and light as nite and lite.

I would hang a footnote on the occurrence of a word with a contentious spelling, explaining my position on spelling and that is that. Academics do not have to be tied to other people's conventions based on national borders.