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.

Every day I use web-based tools in my research. Some are specifically designed for scientific research, but some are just general purpose tools. It continually surprises me when other students and more established researchers have not heard of the many different ways the web can help research. This list is not meant to be exhaustive so please let me know if there are any tools you use that deserve a mention.