What format do scientific research papers use? [duplicate]

Question

I was wondering what kind of association format scientific researchers use to publish their work/papers. Is it MLA or APA? Which is more commonly used? If I wanted to write a research paper, on, say, quantum physics, what format should I utilize? Thanks.

Answer 1

Use a citation manager tool to write your papers. Using a tool like this, you just store meta data (author list, title, year, journal name, etc) about the sources you are citing and the software puts placeholders in your document that link to this meta data. There are options for both LaTeX (which I'd suggest especially if you're writing in a math/equation-heavy area) and "Microsoft Word"-style applications.

When you're ready to submit for publishing, you'll choose the style of the journal you plan to submit to and it will format the in-text citations for you and add a references list at the end of your document automatically.

Often journals aren't using one of the "standard" guides like MLA or APA (I have never encountered any "standard" format in any journal I've ever submitted to), but rather their own pet format (which might be similar but not identical to one of those). Hopefully they'll provide authors with a file that citation managers understand that describes their format, but some journals don't and you'll have to do your own; even then, it's still a lot easier than manually formatting everything. When your paper gets rejected and you have to resubmit it somewhere else, you'll reformat everything to the new journal.