AGU Editorial Style Guide for Authors
AGU staff edits journal articles for clarity, consistency, and house style. It is not the function of staff to rewrite.
AGU style is based on the Chicago Manual of Style and Words Into Type. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Webster’s Third International Dictionary (and its Addendum), and The Glossary of Geology are used for hyphenation and spelling. Because the writing is scientific and not literary, AGU uses an open punctuation style, i.e., using only as much punctuation as necessary for clarity.
Note that the metric system should be used throughout, and the use of appropriate SI units is encouraged.
Most frequent changes made in editing:
- Changing to American spellings
- Removing special typefaces (i.e., italics, boldface) used for emphasis
- Incorporating footnoted information into text. (Footnotes are used only for affiliations and auxiliary material.)
- Changing to international date format: 25 January 2003 (in tables, months may be abbreviated)
- Adding full ranges for years: 1989–1990
- Removing commas in numbers less than 10,000 (e.g., 7213)
- Adding serial commas before conjunctions
- Defining abbreviations/acronyms at first use
- Adding zero before a decimal point: 0.25
Updates to editorial style:
- Annum (a) is used to denote year as a unit of measure; use a, ka, Ma, or Ga rather than year (or yr) kyr, Myr (or m.y.), or Gyr.
More details, including a list of words commonly occurring in AGU articles and their treatment (hyphenation, capitalization, etc.), are available in the AGU Grammar and Style Guide (PDF).
See also AGU Reference Style guide (PDF).
For questions, contact: author.help@agu.org.
