I am currently finishing up a paper that is about to be submitted to the arXiv and I thought I would go through the list of things I normally do just before sending the work off. It’s mainly a common sense list but in the rush to get something out it is good to have a list to work from to make sure you don’t miss anything (misspelling collaborators names is not helpful!).

• Check bib style is correct. If the journal you are planning to submit to has a particular house style for the bibliography it is probably worth using it in the arXiv submission.
• Check bibliography text is correct. Even though I think BiBTeX is the great, and much easier than preparing the bibliography by hand (which some people still do), there can be instances when a stray space or mistakenly capitalised letter appear. If you get your BiBTeX entries from SPIRES or Inspire this is mostly taken care of, but there is always the odd paper or book entry that you have typed in by hand. Check the final output in the paper, not just the .bib file contents.

Someone asked me how I achieved the effects on my slides in the talk I gave at QMUL, so having written them an email outlining all the customisations I usually make, I thought the subject might be worthy of a blogpost. I use the Beamer package for LaTeX which is a great way to include mathematics in your slides, and is pretty straightforward to use if you are proficient with LaTeX.

So it turns out that I am going to give a talk at UK Cosmo next week. It’s only supposed to be 18 minutes long, which you might imagine wouldn’t be that difficult to put together, but as you can tell from the lack of posts here recently, I’ve been having some problems. The talk is supposed to be based on our last paper (which will soon appear in JCAP by the way), but with limited time I think I will have to speed through it pretty quickly.