Create a checklist so authors can check if their articles are properly formatted

[mrshirts]

I feel for many people, they just want a checklist to go over to make sure their paper is formatted correctly. Obviously the template helps, but a checklist on what is required rather than having requirements scattered in different parts of the site would be good. The comments added in #105 are a good sample of things that could be checklisted.

[davidlmobley]

What exactly would you want in such a checklist and where would it go?

Right now we have "two" main places with requirements

• Author guide section on preparation of your article for submission which has a concise explanation of how articles should be put together and (once a couple PRs are merged) info on figures/references/grammar and style
• The relevant category-specific guidelines

It's not totally obvious to me how we would make these much more concise unless we just tell them to:

• check that it is well edited [link]
• make sure their figures are up to par [link]
• check their references [link]
• check that they conform to the category-specific guidelines [link]
• provide a representative image [link]

Is that what you're after?

[davidlmobley]

@mrshirts ?

[davidlmobley]

@dwsideriusNIST - did you think we need a checklist? If so, ideas on what it should include?

You mentioned this in livecomsjournal/article_templates#3 ; ideally I'd make some set of changes that will close both, but it would be good to be more concrete about what we want. I'm worried about having information in too many different places. On the other hand, for ease of use it's probably good to have quite a bit IN the templates as authors are guaranteed to use those as they start working.

I would propose we:

1. Add an explicit "author checklist" on livecomsjournal.github.io under author instructions that just very concisely reminds them of what to check as listed just above
2. Add info to the templates as listed here: Improve description of how to use templates. article_templates#3 (comment)