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Discrepancies between reported word count

← Author Guidelines
Q: My manuscript is not accepted by the system, because it says the document has too many words. However if I look at the word count provided by my text editor, the word count is below the maximum limit.

A: Our application uses wc, a UNIX program specifically for counting words in documents. However, the formula for word count (what counts as a word?) is not standardised, so different applications may return very different results.

Obviously, it is the word count result of our application that is used to determine whether a manuscript file respects the imposed minimum and maximum word count limits. We can not make exceptions in this for individual cases.

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