How to shorten an article before submitting to a journal

Question

Does anyone know a good online source for guidelines for shortening journal articles? I've just finished a paper that I'm going to submit soon, but I think it is far too long. Its current length is 30 journal pages. (I know that because I've obsessively figured out what formatting would get me to have 1 word processed page for each journal page of a specific journal.) This is in the humanities.

So I just want some good guidelines for things like "get rid of 'the fact that'." The only such things that I found online were directed at people writing their college-admissions essay, which has to be very short, like 500 words.

Answer 1

Just to add to the many answers already here, I'll put what I usually do. I'm often quite verborragic while writing, so this is a common problem for me, as we can all see :)

1) Revise every single sentence, not only to remove stuff that is not needed, ("To this end", "such as", ..., I usually use that stuff to "link" ideas while writing, but they are not needed and usually can be cut out without significant change), but also, as said previously here, to better express your points. Be concise.

2) Remove trailing sentences in the end of paragraphs that do not use the full width of the column. Some times you have one or two words dangling on the end of a paragraph that waste a whole line. At one time, I managed to get a little less than half a page of space on a eight page article just by doing that.

3) Check the references. If the journal is not against journal names abbreviations, do it. The same trailing thing applies here as well...

However, those tips only work if you are close to the mark... For instance, one of my articles was reduced from 10 to 8 pages after the first review... We had no choice but to cut content and move it to supplementary material.

Always keep in mind what information you want to convey...

Answer 2

In my experience, I have found there are four main strategies for reducing the length of a paper. In order of most to least radical, they are:

1. Write a different paper. For example, one of my recently accepted papers really wanted to be about four times as long as the page limit, and also would have required at least another month of work beyond the deadline in order to properly complete. When this became clear, it was time for radical surgery: most of the original manuscript was pushed off into future work and only the first key result was expanded into the full presentation it deserved. We added the word "Toward" to the front of the title and started working on the follow-up paper that contains the rest of the work.
2. Drop significant chunks of the paper. A slightly less radical version of the first, it may be that you can keep the narrative and main results, but drop some of the secondary explorations entirely. This is the course I dislike most, because it can significantly weaken the work and "less important" dropped sections are unlikely to be able to form a separate publication on their own. This can work, however, for a conference publication that will be followed by an extended journal version (e.g., the conference version sketches an analysis of less important properties of the system being studied, while the journal version contains full exhaustive proofs).
3. Shove things into supplementary material. If you're submitting to a journal, it's typically possible to put unlimited amounts of information into the supplementary material. This can be a win-win situation, in which you drop significant chunks of the paper without actually omitting them, just tucking them off where only those who really care will read them.
4. Squeeze blood from a stone. Careful and thorough editing can often remove a remarkable amount of length from a paper, but it's a very time consuming and painful process. I can typically halve the length of a manuscript without omitting anything simply by dint of streamlining the presentation down to the level of individual words and phrases. Cutting 10% is not too hard for a native speaker with enough time to invest; getting all the way to 50% is an exhaustive exercise in scientific haiku. Usually, it's better to use one of the more radical but less painful strategies instead, but I have had special occasions where squeezing blood from a stone was the right approach.

I actually recommend that your consideration move from most to least radical, the reason being that the more radical actions are often actually easier, because they require less precision.

Answer 3

In general articles in the humanities are significantly longer than those in the sciences, as I'm sure you know. Does the length of your paper far exceed those typically published in your journal of choice? Then maybe some cutting is in order.

I know what you're looking for, a handy-dandy list of things to look for when revising, but I don't know of one. I think you need another pair of eyes. Do you have a colleague whose writing you admire that could have a look at it for you?

For nearly my entire academic career, I was in a writer's group with three of my colleagues. We would meet once a month or so, when someone had a conference paper to give or was finishing up on an article. It's invaluable to have a few colleagues you trust to give each other feedback. It might be a little late for this paper, but if you could even barter with someone (you'll be a reader for them in the future), it would help you greatly, I'm sure.

Good luck with it --

Answer 4

After some serious googling, I found a site with just the sort of recommendations I was looking for. Shortens without removing content at all. I just wish it were longer, because the suggestions are really good: Need to shorten your paper? Hopefully this might help other people.

An example of the recommendations:

(1) Proteins have various functions that are precisely controlled.

You can shorten this in two ways. First, revise to emphasize the important point, which in the context of the paper was not the variety of protein functions but the precise control of those functions. Second, eliminate unnecessary prepositional phrase: use “protein function” not “functions of proteins.”

Protein function is precisely controlled.

Answer 5

A couple things to consider:

• You think it is too long, but does the journal you intend to submit it to think it's too long? If nothing else, knowing this knows your target.
• Is there things you can offload into an online or supplemental appendix? Good examples include proofs and the like in papers where the actual results are of interest, or technical details, supplemental or supporting analysis, etc.
• When it comes down to it and you just need to start killing words - start marching through, getting rid of long phrases, parenthetical asides that don't need to be there, superfluous adjectives, etc.

Answer 6

At the risk of creating a "just a link" answer, there's an online Stanford course about writing for the sciences.

The first few lectures are about "cutting the clutter" and give quite a few examples showing lengthy academic-style text being shortened and made more readable, with specific techniques being discussed. For example, academic writers often turn verbs into nouns, like so:

"We performed the configuration on the gewgaws."

Which could be shortened (and improved) to:

"We configured the gewgaws."

Answer 7

I don't think that an automatic tool will do that for you, and I don't think that you should use one.

If you don't want to shorten, you may consider finding a journal that allows more pages.

If you want to stick to this journal, then it is better that you shorten manually. Then you can decide what is important and what should be left out. There are many way to shorten a paper, for example by shrinking or removing unecessary details in some figures, removing a few references, removing some figures, removing or rewritting text differently, etc. There is no tool that will do that intelligently for you. You really need to do that by hand.

Answer 8

I'm not sure what the structure of your article is, but I would make sure you are matching the writing to the target audience. I've found that it's possible to cut a large amount of background material from a paper on the grounds that the audience is most likely already experts, or has access to that information and can readily understand it without me having to spell it out for them.

I've been able to reduce paragraphs and sometimes whole sections down to one sentence with a reference to a book chapter.

Answer 9

If all you care about are small stylistic changes, I'd suggest looking into The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. It's a very short and concise (and therefore cheap) book that largely focuses on similar issues. That the book is so short proves that the authors know very well what they are talking about.