Vocabulary

Sentence case

Sentence case is the conventional way of using capital letters in a sentence. That is, you only capitalise the first letter of the first word – like you would in a sentence. Proper nouns (including abbreviations, gene names, journal titles, scientific databases, etc.) have initial capitals as well.

Examples:

The cat sat on the mat.

London is a capital of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Title case

Title case is the conventional way of using capital letters in a sentence. That is, you capitalise all principal words. Articles, conjunctions, and prepositions do not get capital letters unless they start the title.

Examples:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Seven Habits of Effective People.

Plain text

“Normal” text which does not have any special text formatting (i.e. it has default font, size and is not styled into bold or italics).

Mononym

Person who has only last name (no first name or middle name(s)).

Group Authorship

Group Authorship is a large numbers of investigators working under a single group name. Group-author articles involve the following parties: the overall group, members of the group who take responsibility for authorship of the article (named individual authors), and members of the group who do not take responsibility for authorship of the article but have contributed to the work that led to the article (nonauthor group members).

Examples:

Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network

North Central Cancer Treatment Group Study N0177

en dash

The en dash (–) is slightly wider than the hyphen (-) but narrower than the em dash (—). The typical computer keyboard lacks a dedicated key for the en dash, though most word processors provide a means for its insertion.

Figure panel

Figures can contain several “embedded” images, each of which contains its own identifier - a letter. Those “embedded” images are called figure panels.

Example:

Large Tables

Applicable to Supplementary materials only! Tables which span across 2 or more pages. Tables which fit into 2 pages should be published as PDF for convenient printing, whilst large tables should be published as Excel (.xlsx) or Word (.docx) documents. See more information in Large tables check

Month abbreviation style (News papers)

The following abbreviations are allowed for News (Reference to article section). Note that there is no period after abbreviation.

Month	Abbreviation
January	Jan
February	Feb
March	Mar
April	Apr
May	May
June	June
July	July
August	Aug
September	Sept
October	Oct
November	Nov
December	Dec

How to check whether term, keyword etc is in correct case?

1. Search article text for the term in question. Most likely you will find a few instances, which will give you understanding regarding correct capitalisation. If this is not the case, check next points.
2. Search PubMed site (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) for the term in question.
3. Search Google for the term in question.