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The good news about journal submissions: publishers standardized on LaTeX classes long ago, so “format for journal X” usually means changing one line — the document class — not reformatting your paper. The bad news: each family of classes has its own metadata commands and submission quirks, and formatting problems are among the most avoidable reasons manuscripts bounce back. This guide covers the two biggest class families and the checklist that keeps submissions clean.

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Rule Zero: the Author Guidelines Outrank Everything

Every journal publishes author guidelines naming the required class, bibliography style, and submission format. Read them before writing the preamble — retrofitting a paper from the wrong class family costs an afternoon; starting in the right one costs nothing.

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The IEEE Family: IEEEtran

IEEE conferences and journals use IEEEtran, which ships with TeX Live. It sets the two-column layout, fonts, and spacing — you write ordinary LaTeX inside it: What’s IEEE-specific is small: the class option (conference vs journal), the \IEEEauthorblockN/\IEEEauthorblockA author commands, and the IEEEtran bibliography style (\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran} with classic BibTeX). Everything else — sections, math, figures, tables — is standard.

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The Elsevier Family: elsarticle

Elsevier journals use elsarticle, also in TeX Live. Its signature feature is the class option that switches between submission formatting and final formatting: The review option double-spaces the manuscript for referees, and lineno’s \linenumbers gives them line numbers to cite in their reports — both standard requests in review-stage submissions. When the paper is accepted, switching to the journal’s final layout is a change of class options, not a rewrite. Springer (svjour/sn-jnl), ACM (acmart), and APS (revtex) follow the same pattern: a class from the publisher, a handful of metadata commands, and a named bibliography style.

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The Pre-Submission Checklist

These six items cover most formatting-related bounce-backs:
  1. Exact class and options from the guidelines — including the right variant (conference vs journal, review vs final).
  2. The required bibliography style, not your favorite one. If the journal says IEEEtran or elsarticle-num, author-year preferences don’t apply.
  3. Figures in the required format and resolution — typically vector PDF/EPS for line art; check whether the journal wants figures embedded or as separate numbered files.
  4. No missing references or citations. Compile from scratch and search the log for “undefined” — a ? in a submitted PDF reads as carelessness.
  5. Submit what the system wants: source or PDF. Many systems recompile your source; if so, include the .bbl file (most don’t run BibTeX) and every file the document inputs.
  6. Keep the submitted state. Tag the repository or save a named version at the moment of submission — revisions arrive months later, and latexdiff against the exact submitted source is what journals mean by “marked-up manuscript”.

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Working with Journal Classes in the Cloud

Because IEEEtran, elsarticle, and the other major classes ship with TeX Live, they compile in LaTeX Cloud Studio without installing anything — and a class file the journal supplies separately works too, dropped into the project folder like any other file. The version-history side matters at submission time: a named snapshot per submission round is exactly what step 6 above asks for. Start your manuscript →