Basic rules for abbreviating journal titles:
- Abbreviate the "significant " words in a journal title according to ISO 4. (https://www.issn.org/services/online-services/access-to-the-ltwa/)
- Omit articles, conjunctions, and prepositions
- Capitalize all abbreviated words.
- Only abbreviate title proper
- subtitles are not part of the title proper
- names of sponsoring organizations are excluded
- Single word titles and titles in character-based languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are not abbreviated.
- EX. Science. remains Science.
- Single-syllable words and words of 5 or fewer letters (in singular form are not usually abbreviated.
- EX. Blood Cells. remains Blood Cells.
- Abbreviation is preferred by truncation: at least the 2 final letters of a word are dropped.
- EX. Geological Survey of Finland Bulletin. becomes Geol Surv Finl Bull.
- Cognates and variant forms with the same stem in the same, or a related language are represented by the same abbreviation.
- EX. Entologica Americana. becomes Entomol Am.
- EX. Entomologist's Gazette. becomes Entomol Gaz.
- Commonly used words with the same meaning are abbreviated in the same manner across languages.
- EX. Journal becomes J
- EX. Zeitscrift becomes Z
- Words may also be abbreviated by contraction (omission of internal letters).
- EX. Zeitung becomes Ztg
- EX. Country becomes Ctry
- All punctuation within titles is omitted, including apostrophes, ampersands, commas dashes, and hyphens.
- Hyphenated terms are treated as 2 words if they can stand alone or are collapsed to 1 word if they cannot.
- EX. Suicide & Life-Threatening Behavior. becomes Suicide Life Threat Behav.
- EX. Journal of Nero-Oncology. becomes J Neurooncol.
- All diacritical marks are omitted.
Scientific style and format: the CSE manual for authors, editors, and publishers. c2014. 8th ed. Chicago (IL): University of Chicago Press. p. 643-644.
