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.

My new paper, written with Karim Malik, has just been released into the wild. We show that it is possible to numerically simulate second order perturbations for a single scalar field with a canonical action. I’ve been working on this for a long time and learned a lot about the mechanics of inflation in the process. I’ve also churned out quite a lot of python code, and learned some rudimentary parallel programming.