¶ Summary.
For purposes of clarity, Confoederatio, Research Division (abbreviated CRD) maintains an institutional style guide for the writing of papers and other formally submitted texts, as well as for intermediate work. This visual and formatting style guied is presented below in fixed alphabetical sections.
¶ Authorship.
All authors must use persistent pseudonyms with chosen first and last names across papers, and only persons/members that have actively helped write up/edit the paper should be mentioned in the header (contributors to the paper should be mentioned in prose, not in header). Do not use Oxford commas when listing authors/editors, and separate authors from editors using a semicolon. You may not change your pseudonym once submitted.
Who is a member of Confoederatio?
A member of Confoederatio is someone that is officially on our List of Personnel (either as a core member or contributor), and has actively contributed to Confoederatio within the last 12 months. When writing internally, ‘papers authored by members of Confoederatio’, or statements to that effect, refer to any paper or work that has a Confoederatio member as either an author, contributor, or editor.
¶ Branding and Layout.
Note. Technical drafts do not follow this style guide, and are intended to be written up as quickly as possible for maximum circulation and iterative speed.
Branding and layout an important component of clarity as to where a paper originates from, and should be present in the immediate heading format, and helps to portray your paper in a formal light. Document layouts should always be A4 with top: 0,5in; bottom: 0,5in; and 1in side margins.
The main logo font is Karla Bold 16pt (uppercase), to be inserted after an additional 16pt top margin; with a 2pt line break followed by a Source Serif 4 16pt uppercase header. Any subtext after the initial paper name is to be rendered in Source Serif 4 14pt; with dates and authors in Karla Light 11pt. Emails are to be separated using the pipe (|) separator. Emails should always use a functional mailto: hyperlink. Note the full stop after the ending of the logo.
The logo for papers should not include the neon blue stripe, and the text should be selectable; with the Hansard flush with the text.
¶ Citations.
Aggregate databases.
Note that if you must build upon previous reference work and exceed the self-citation quota, you should aggregate said papers into either a Gazetteer (collection of multiple papers and resources), not subject to the self-citation guideline; or into a Database (which should be open-source, with the possibility for fresh replication from first principles and inputs).
Citation formatting.
Citations should be in altered APA numerical format, such that numbers are ascending in order of appearance and 1-indexed. These are placed inline in the form ‘[1][2][3]’ after the end of a relevant clause (they do not necessarily have to be at the end of a sentence). Try to keep citation padding to a minimum; what matters more is the quality, rather than the quantity of your sources. Be critical of your sources. You may use non-scholarly work since we work mainly on applied database research, but it should always be buttressed by research-grade work where possible.
When citing previous work for the paper, you may place figures or models in Appendices rather than Works Cited. These appendices do not count towards the self-citation limit, and should be referenced inline in rounded brackets, i.e. (Appendix 1). Your Works Cited. section and bibliography should always be at the end of a paper, and both Appendices. and Works Cited. should have line breaks after and preceding them as standalone headers.
Any annotations for your citations are to be added in a double line break, followed by ‘Note: <Text>’. Do not add unnecessary indentation to source formatting - they should be flush to the numbered list, which should have bullets along the lines of ‘1. <Text>/2. <Text>', etc.
Self-citations.
A self-citation is defined as being any citation referencing the work of any member of Confoederatio.
In formal papers, self-citations should be mentioned twice - once in prose upon invocation (formatting may vary), and again in the footnotes in the interests of transparency (bolded, ‘Note: This is a self-citation'), since self-citations are inherently more suspect and do not build upon generally accepted secondary sources.
This practice is mandated such that authors within CRD must inherently interact with professional outside work rather than creating circular reference loops. Outside of technical drafts, self-citations must either be only 2 citations at most, or <10% of your total citations; whichever is more.
Source Caching.
It is best practice within Confoederatio to cache sources as you write a paper in a section at the bottom of your main draft. These should have unique numerical identifiers delimited by square brackets such that they can be find and replaced later. Source caches are typically comprised mainly of URLs, and should therefore not be seen as formal citations. They may contain notes on what the sources are used for or what they contain, but should be removed prior to publication.
¶ Dates and Figures.
Dates.
Dates should always be spelled out in dd Month YYYY, without leading zeroes. If dates are non-contemporary or ambiguous, they should be suffixed with either AD or BC. For technical purposes, negative years indicate BC, and positive years indicate AD. There may sometimes be a 1-year error in certain datasets where the year 0 is present; it should be taken to signify 1AD.
Do not write -27BC or +15AD; they should only be formatted 27BC and 15AD, or -27 and 15 respectively. You should only ever use 24-hour time, and all timezones should be given relative to GMT (i.e. 15:33GMT). Make sure to use leading zeroes to avoid confusion with 12-hour time (i.e. 09:14). We do not use 12-hour time for the reason that it is both confusing (is 12:00AM midnight or noon?) and longer to use.
Figures and Related Captions.
In Confoederatio figures, there are 3 types of generally accepted figures:
- Figures (any figure not generally covered below, typically in the form of graphs or formal images. These should be listed with the bottom caption: ‘Figure #. <Text>’ in order of appearance);
- Images (any non-traditional graphic that is used for illustration or expression. These should be listed with the bottom caption: ‘Image #. <Text>’ in order of appearance);
- and Tables (which should be listed with the bottom caption: ‘Table #. <Text>’ in order of appearance.
Note. Above # characters delimit separate identifiers; i.e. they should start from the first of that type, such that if you have 1 Table, 1 Image, and 1 Figure; they should be labelled ‘Table 1.’, ‘Image 1.’, and ‘Figure 1.’ respectively.
Best practices indicate that you should emphasise the legibility of your figures and their content by keeping them inline to the same page with surrounding relevant interaction. Captions should always be on the same page as the figure/image, and tables must always contain a header row and at least 2-3 body rows on the same page. Insert line-breaks as necessary, and ensure that stray rows are not present.
You may also have an optional top cation. Both bottom and top captions should be centred and formatted with regular body text.
Numbers.
All numbers should be given in European decimal form (i.e. 1.143,56); and if the figure is to be rounded, it should ideally be rounded to the hundredths place. At least one integer digit should be present to the left of the decimal separator: i.e. 0,05; not ,05. When listing multiple European decimal figures in succession, use semicolons as their separator. This is not necessary for integers without sigfigs following the decimal separator. You may use trailing zeroes at your discretion for legibility. When conducting calculations in spreadsheets, make sure to set your locale to DE/Germany.
Approximate numbers should be prefixed with ~, and uncertainty ranges should be formatted +/-. There should always be a space before and after additive and subtractive operands, but not multiplicative or divisive operands (i.e. ‘5,3 +/- 0,006’; but not ‘5 / 6’). Do not use Unicode fractions except in equations.
When abbreviating large numbers, they should follow a one to two letter format: k for thousand, mn for million, bn for billion, tn for trillion, qn for quadrillion, qt for quintillion, and so on. This is done to avoid confusion (i.e. whether £5M references £5.000.000 [million] or £5.000.000.000 [milliard]). Do not use milliard/billiard scales, or lakhs and crores.
Tables.
Additional formatting is required for tables. All table cells should have a cell padding of 0,01in and should be left-aligned, including for header rows. Header rows must be bolded in Karla 11pt, whilst body rows must be in the main body text font (Source Serif 4 11pt).
¶ Language.
All Confoederatio papers (including technical drafts, and those from CTD) should be written in non-Oxford British English with a reference timespan of the late 20th century (1950-1999AD) to prevent current colloquialisms. When referring to Confoederatio research, use the term ‘we’, and attempt to avoid first-person dependency, i.e. ‘I optimised agentic behaviour by applying stock-matrix parallelisation. I then …’, as it comes off as being unprofessional.
Additionally, introduce abbreviations in round brackets upon first mention where they may otherwise be unclear in your document.
¶ Linkage.
To prevent link rot, published Confoederatio papers should be uploaded to both confoederatio.org/papers/ and a publicly accessible Gdrive mirror such that they can be readily accessed internally. Note that confoederatio.org/papers/ are also backed up to GitHub. Add links in citations whereever possible, even to download links if necessary such that readers can readily check on sourcing.
¶ Organisation.
Like many organisations, CRD has an internal tagging system by discipline/field, designated by Project 0024. These are not necessary to insert into your papers, but should be kept in mind when interpreting or writing them. These are split into 3 Registers (R1 - Humanities, R2 - Hard Sciences, R3 - Soft Sciences). These are arranged as follows, alongside their two-letter abbreviation:
R1.
- Art (Aa)
- Cultural History (Ch)
- Fiction (Fi)
- Historiography (Hi)
R2.
- AI/Computer Science (Ld)
- Biology (Bi)
- Chemistry (Cm)
- Demography/Statistics (Ds)
- Mathematics (Mt)
- Physics (Fc)
R3.
- Anthropology (An)
- Cartography (Cg)
- Complex Systems (Cs)
- Economics (Eo)
- Geopolitics (Gt)
- Graphics Design (Gf)
- Logistics/Military Science (Lm)
- Pedagogy (Pg)
- Sociology (Sc)
Not all of these disciplines are in active use due to our main subject focus regarding computational simulation, tooling, and applied database reconstruction, but they exist in classification for future use where necessary, or where personnel may reasonably be added on later.
¶ Quotes.
Papers generally have two types of quotes - blockquotes and inline quotes, both of which should be integrated into the text so as not to break it. If your original reference includes extensive linebreaks, you may wish to consider placing virgules (i.e. ‘Line 1/Line 2’, etc). The first layered quote should always be in single inverted commas, with double inverted commas serving as nested quotes. Further nested quotes should alternate between single and double inverted commas.
| Example 1. (Block-quote, numerical citation) | Example 2. (Block-quote, manual citation) |
|---|---|
| 'According to the calculations, the acquisition of the area by the Monarchy, the purchase of the infrastructure developed by the Spanish, would have cost approximately HUF 150.000 and the development and operation of the commercial site would have cost another HUF 100.000 … Therefore, the area [Rio de Oro] did not pay the rent of HUF20.000 in 1899, not even the deposit of HUF50.000 negotiated by the end of 1899, which was a basic condition for the continuation of the negotiations’ [9]. | ‘I take my estimates from Kremer (1993), but it would not matter if I had chosen some other authority’. - De Long, 1998 |
Quote attribution may be done either by way of invoking numerical citation (see Example 1) or by manual attribution, which shoul provide enough information such that the original text can be found by the reader (see Example 2). Main quote text (but not their attribution), should always be italicised.
If you have punctuation marks at the end of the quote, full stops should go after the attribution or single inverted comma, and other punctuation ought to remain inside the quoted text. Quotes not originally sourced in English should be placed in their original source language in italics, followed within the same quote block by their English translation. English-language quotes do not require further translation.
¶ Software.
When conducting research, try and keep your software as minimally dependent on software outside the Confoederatio stack as possible. Generally, all software used by CRD should be based on our in-house software engines (either Universal Framework/Scriptly-CLI/Scriptly-UI). You may also borrow software tooling from CTD.
If you have to use external dependencies, download specific versions of those dependencies for manual importation. All software stacks and models used in CRD papers must explicitly be open-source (either on GitHub or GitLab), with full tools for data replication. If input files are too large to commit, use Confoederatio-side data vaults instead.
¶ Typography.
- Karla Bold: Header text (16pt logo, 11pt inline header, 11pt Light attribution)
- Source Serif 4: Body text (16pt title, 14pt subtitle, 11pt main text)