Manuscript Formatting

Word Counts

Many journals have strict word count limits, and some of them even have guidelines for manuscript sections. For example, jneurosci allows an introduction of only 1000 words. To track this, an awkward solution is to copy/paste sections of the paper into a new document to get Microsoft Word to report the word count for the pasted text. Kludgy. A more elegant solution is to make use of MS Word's section break feature to break up the paper into sections, and then using the macro code below to report the word count of each section:

Sub SectionWordCount()
'
' SectionWordCount Macro
' Generates a message box with the word count for each section appearing in the document
'
   Dim NumSec As Integer
   Dim S As Integer
   Dim Summary As String

   NumSec = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
   Summary = "Word Count" & vbCrLf
   For S = 1 To NumSec
       Summary = Summary & "Section " & S & ": " _
         & ActiveDocument.Sections(S).Range.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticWords) _
         & vbCrLf
   Next
   Summary = Summary & "Document: " & _
     ActiveDocument.Range.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticWords)
   MsgBox Summary
End Sub

Instructions for creating a new macro in MS Word can be found here (go to the section on Writing a macro from scratch in Visual Basic).