elsarticle.cls – A better way to format your document

This is a specimen document.

elsarticle@stmdocs.in

3.3

Introduction¶

elsarticle.cls is a thoroughly re-written document class for formatting submissions to Elsevier journals. The class uses the environments and commands defined in kernel without any change in the signature so that clashes with other contributed packages such as hyperref.sty, preview-latex.sty, etc., will be minimal. elsarticle.cls is primarily built upon the default article.cls. This class depends on the following packages for its proper functioning:

1. natbib.sty for citation processing;

2. geometry.sty for margin settings;

3. fleqn.clo for left aligned equations;

4. graphicx.sty for graphics inclusion;

5. txfonts.sty optional font package, if the document is to be formatted with Times and compatible math fonts;

6. hyperref.sty optional packages if hyperlinking is required in the document;

7. endfloat.sty optional packages if floats to be placed at end of the PDF.

All the above packages (except some optional packages) are part of any standard installation. Therefore, the users need not be bothered about downloading any extra packages. Furthermore, users are free to make use of ams math packages such as amsmath.sty, amsthm.sty, amssymb.sty, amsfonts.sty, etc., if they want to. All these packages work in tandem with elsarticle.cls without any problems.

Major Differences¶

Following are the major differences between elsarticle.cls and its predecessor package, elsart.cls:

1. elsarticle.cls is built upon article.cls while elsart.cls is not. elsart.cls redefines many of the commands in the classes/kernel, which can possibly cause surprising clashes with other contributed packages;

2. provides preprint document formatting by default, and optionally formats the document as per the final style of models $1+$, $3+$ and $5+$ of Elsevier journals;

3. some easier ways for formatting list and theorem environments are provided while people can still use amsthm.sty package;

4. natbib.sty is the main citation processing package which can comprehensively handle all kinds of citations and works perfectly with hyperref.sty in combination with hypernat.sty;

5. long title pages are processed correctly in preprint and final formats.

Installation¶

The package is available at author resources page at Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/latex). It can also be found in any of the nodes of the Comprehensive Archive Network (ctan), one of the primary nodes being http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/elsarticle/. Please download the elsarticle.dtx which is a composite class with documentation and elsarticle.ins which is the installer file. When we compile the elsarticle.ins with it provides the class file, elsarticle.cls by stripping off all the documentation from the *.dtx file. The class may be moved or copied to a place, usually, $TEXMF/tex/latex/elsevier/,

or a folder which will be read by during document compilation. The file database needs updation after moving/copying class file. Usually, we use commands like mktexlsr or texhash depending upon the distribution and operating system.

Usage¶

The class should be loaded with the command:

where the options can be the following:

preprint

default option which format the document for submission to Elsevier journals.

review

similar to the preprint option, but increases the baselineskip to facilitate easier review process.

1p

formats the article to the look and feel of the final format of model 1+ journals. This is always single column style.

3p

formats the article to the look and feel of the final format of model 3+ journals. If the journal is a two column model, use twocolumn option in combination.

5p

formats for model 5+ journals. This is always of two column style.

authoryear

author-year citation style of natbib.sty. If you want to add extra options of natbib.sty, you may use the options as comma delimited strings as arguments to \biboptions command. An example would be:

number

numbered citation style. Extra options can be loaded with \biboptions command.

sort&compress

sorts and compresses the numbered citations. For example, citation [1,2,3] will become [1–3].

longtitle

if front matter is unusually long, use this option to split the title page across pages with the correct placement of title and author footnotes in the first page.

times

loads txfonts.sty, if available in the system to use Times and compatible math fonts.

reversenotenum

Use alphabets as author–affiliation linking labels and use numbers for author footnotes. By default, numbers will be used as author–affiliation linking labels and alphabets for author footnotes.

lefttitle

To move title and author/affiliation block to flushleft. centertitle is the default option which produces center alignment.

endfloat

To place all floats at the end of the document.

nonatbib

To unload natbib.sty.

doubleblind

To hide author name, affiliation, email address etc. for double blind refereeing purpose.

All options of article.cls can be used with this document class.

The default options loaded are a4paper, 10pt, oneside, onecolumn and preprint.

Frontmatter¶

There are two types of frontmatter coding:

1. each author is connected to an affiliation with a footnote marker; hence all authors are grouped together and affiliations follow;

2. authors of same affiliations are grouped together and the relevant affiliation follows this group.

An example of coding the first type is provided below.

The output of the above source is given in Clips %s and %s. The header portion or title area is given in Clip %s and the footer area is given in Clip %s.

blue!70 Header of the title page. 1130 612 477 7071psingleauthorgroup.pdf

orange

blue!70 Footer of the title page. 193 135 499 2551pseperateaug.pdf

orange

Most of the commands such as \title, \author, \affiliation are self explanatory. Various components are linked to each other by a label–reference mechanism; for instance, title footnote is linked to the title with a footnote mark generated by referring to the \label string of the \tnotetext. We have used similar commands such as \tnoteref (to link title note to title); \corref (to link corresponding author text to corresponding author); \fnref (to link footnote text to the relevant author names). needs two compilations to resolve the footnote marks in the preamble part. Given below are the syntax of various note marks and note texts.

where <label(s)> can be either one or more comma delimited label strings. The optional arguments to the \author command holds the ref label(s) of the address(es) to which the author is affiliated while each \affiliation command can have an optional argument of a label. In the same manner, \tnotetext, \fntext, \cortext will have optional arguments as their respective labels and note text as their mandatory argument.

The following example code provides the markup of the second type of author-affiliation.

The output of the above source is given in Clip %s.

blue!70 Header of the title page.. 1119 563 468 7091pseperateaug.pdf

orange

Clip %s shows the output after giving doubleblind class option.

blue!70 Double blind article 1124 567 477 670elstest-1pdoubleblind.pdf

orange

The frontmatter part has further environments such as abstracts and keywords. These can be marked up in the following manner:

Each keyword shall be separated by a \sep command. msc classifications shall be provided in the keyword environment with the commands \MSC. \MSC accepts an optional argument to accommodate future revisions. eg., \MSC[2008]. The default is 2000.=-1

New page¶

Sometimes you may need to give a page-break and start a new page after title, author or abstract. Following commands can be used for this purpose.

-2pc

• \newpageafter{title} typeset the title alone on one page.

• \newpageafter{author} typeset the title and author details on one page.

• \newpageafter{abstract} typeset the title, author details and abstract & keywords one one page.

Floats¶

Figures may be included using the command, \includegraphics in combination with or without its several options to further control graphic. \includegraphics is provided by graphic[s,x].sty which is part of any standard distribution. graphicx.sty is loaded by default. accepts figures in the postscript format while pdf accepts *.pdf, *.mps (metapost), *.jpg and *.png formats. pdf does not accept graphic files in the postscript format.

The table environment is handy for marking up tabular material. If users want to use multirow.sty, array.sty, etc., to fine control/enhance the tables, they are welcome to load any package of their choice and elsarticle.cls will work in combination with all loaded packages.

Theorem and theorem like environments¶

elsarticle.cls provides a few shortcuts to format theorems and theorem-like environments with ease. In all commands the options that are used with the \newtheorem command will work exactly in the same manner. elsarticle.cls provides three commands to format theorem or theorem-like environments:

The \newtheorem command formats a theorem in ’s default style with italicized font, bold font for theorem heading and theorem number at the right hand side of the theorem heading. It also optionally accepts an argument which will be printed as an extra heading in parentheses.

Clip %s will show you how some text enclosed between the above code looks like:

blue!70 newtheorem 21 1 453 120jfigs.pdf orange

The \newdefinition command is the same in all respects as its \newtheorem counterpart except that the font shape is roman instead of italic. Both \newdefinition and \newtheorem commands automatically define counters for the environments defined.

blue!70 newdefinition 11 1 453 105jfigs.pdf orange

The \newproof command defines proof environments with upright font shape. No counters are defined.

blue!70 newproof 31 1 453 65jfigs.pdf orange

Users can also make use of amsthm.sty which will override all the default definitions described above.

Enumerated and Itemized Lists¶

elsarticle.cls provides an extended list processing macros which makes the usage a bit more user friendly than the default list macros. With an optional argument to the \begin{enumerate} command, you can change the list counter type and its attributes.

blue!70 List – Enumerate 41 1 453 185jfigs.pdf orange

Further, the enhanced list environment allows one to prefix a string like ‘step’ to all the item numbers.

blue!70 List – enhanced 51 1 313 83jfigs.pdf orange

Cross-references¶

In electronic publications, articles may be internally hyperlinked. Hyperlinks are generated from proper cross-references in the article. For example, the words Fig. 1 will never be more than simple text, whereas the proper cross-reference \ref{tiger} may be turned into a hyperlink to the figure itself: Fig. 1. In the same way, the words Ref. [1] will fail to turn into a hyperlink; the proper cross-reference is \cite{Knuth96}. Cross-referencing is possible in for sections, subsections, formulae, figures, tables, and literature references.

Mathematical symbols and formulae¶

Many physical/mathematical sciences authors require more mathematical symbols than the few that are provided in standard . A useful package for additional symbols is the amssymb package, developed by the American Mathematical Society. This package includes such oft-used symbols as $\lesssim$ (\lesssim), $\gtrsim$ (\gtrsim) or $\hbar$ (\hbar). Note that your system should have the msam and msbm fonts installed. If you need only a few symbols, such as $\Box$ (\Box), you might try the package latexsym.

Another point which would require authors’ attention is the breaking up of long equations. When you use elsarticle.cls for formatting your submissions in the preprint mode, the document is formatted in single column style with a text width of 384pt or 5.3in. When this document is formatted for final print and if the journal happens to be a double column journal, the text width will be reduced to 224pt at for 3+ double column and 5+ journals respectively. All the nifty fine-tuning in equation breaking done by the author goes to waste in such cases. Therefore, authors are requested to check this problem by typesetting their submissions in final format as well just to see if their equations are broken at appropriate places, by changing appropriate options in the document class loading command, which is explained in section ??, Usage. This allows authors to fix any equation breaking problem before submission for publication. elsarticle.cls supports formatting the author submission in different types of final format. This is further discussed in section ??, Final print.

Displayed equations and double column journals¶

Many Elsevier journals print their text in two columns. Since the preprint layout uses a larger line width than such columns, the formulae are too wide for the line width in print. Here is an example of an equation (see equation 6) which is perfect in a single column preprint format:

In normal course, articles are prepared and submitted in single column format even if the final printed article will come in a double column format journal. Here the problem is that when the article is typeset by the typesetters for paginating and fit within the single column width, they have to break the lengthy equations and align them properly. Even if most of the tasks in preparing your proof is automated, the equation breaking and aligning requires manual judgement, hence this task is manual. When there comes a manual operation that area is error prone. Author needs to check that equation pretty well.

However if authors themselves break the equation to the single column width typesetters need not want to touch these area and the proof authors get will be without any errors.

See equation (6) blue!70

4105 500 500 7001psingleauthorgroup.pdf orange

When this document is typeset for publication in a model 3+ journal with double columns, the equation will overlap the second column text matter if the equation is not broken at the appropriate location.

blue!70 See equation (6) overprints into second column 359 421 532 635elstest-3pd.pdf orange

The typesetter will try to break the equation which need not necessarily be to the liking of the author or as it happens, typesetter’s break point may be semantically incorrect. Therefore, authors may check their submissions for the incidence of such long equations and break the equations at the correct places so that the final typeset copy will be as they wish.

Bibliography¶

Three bibliographic style files (*.bst) are provided — elsarticle-num.bst, elsarticle-num-names.bst and elsarticle-harv.bst — the first one can be used for the numbered scheme, second one for numbered with new options of natbib.sty. The third one is for the author year scheme.

In literature, references are listed in the thebibliography environment. Each reference is a \bibitem and each \bibitem is identified by a label, by which it can be cited in the text:

\bibitem[Elson et al.(1996)]{ESG96} is cited as \citet{ESG96}.

In connection with cross-referencing and possible future hyperlinking it is not a good idea to collect more that one literature item in one \bibitem. The so-called Harvard or author-year style of referencing is enabled by the package natbib. With this package the literature can be cited as follows:

1. Parenthetical: \citep{WB96} produces (Wettig & Brown, 1996).

2. Textual: \citet{ESG96} produces Elson et al. (1996).

3. An affix and part of a reference: \citep[e.g.][Ch. 2]{Gea97} produces (e.g. Governato et al., 1997, Ch. 2).

In the numbered scheme of citation, \cite{<label>} is used, since \citep or \citet has no relevance in the numbered scheme. natbib package is loaded by elsarticle with numbers as default option. You can change this to author-year or harvard scheme by adding option authoryear in the class loading command. If you want to use more options of the natbib package, you can do so with the \biboptions command, which is described in the section ??, Usage. For details of various options of the natbib package, please take a look at the natbib documentation, which is part of any standard installation.

In addition to the above standard .bst files, there are 10 journal-specific .bst files also available. Instruction for using these .bst files can be found at http://support.stmdocs.in

Graphical abstract and highlights¶

A template for adding graphical abstract and highlights are available now. This will appear as the first two pages of the PDF before the article content begins.

Please refer below to see how to code them.

Final print¶

The authors can format their submission to the page size and margins of their preferred journal. elsarticle provides four class options for the same. But it does not mean that using these options you can emulate the exact page layout of the final print copy.

=3em

1p:

$1+$ journals with a text area of 384pt × 562pt or 13.5cm × 19.75cm or 5.3in × 7.78in, single column style only.

3p:

$3+$ journals with a text area of 468pt × 622pt or 16.45cm × 21.9cm or 6.5in × 8.6in, single column style.

twocolumn:

should be used along with 3p option if the journal is $3+$ with the same text area as above, but double column style.

5p:

$5+$ with text area of 522pt × 682pt or 18.35cm × 24cm or 7.22in × 9.45in, double column style only.

Following pages have the clippings of different parts of the title page of different journal models typeset in final format.

Model $1+$ and $3+$ will have the same look and feel in the typeset copy when presented in this document. That is also the case with the double column $3+$ and $5+$ journal article pages. The only difference will be wider text width of higher models. Here are the specimen single and double column journal pages.

blue!70 orange

blue!70 orange

$\Box$