LTWA: The Lit What?

I’ve worked for nearly a decade as an academic and scientific editor, but I did not come across the LTWA until YEARS into my career—certainly many years after it would have arguably been most useful, during my time as an editorial assistant whose chief responsibility was checking and formatting references.

Verifying references can be hard if a journal isn’t on PubMed, and not just because you have to take a few extra steps to track down the publication. How to abbreviate the title itself can be impossible to find.

What if the publication page doesn’t list its title abbreviation anywhere, and the “Cite” tool just regurgitates the full journal name instead of giving you an abbreviation? (There’s an extra level of betrayal when a tool that’s supposed to help kicks you right back to square one.)

You could always try the National Library of Medicine (NLM) catalog or the Web of Science List of Journal Title Abbreviations, but if the journal you’re looking for wasn’t on PubMed in the first place, it might not be available in those places, either.

You could also use the full journal title for that reference and that reference alone. After all, the point of a citation is to make that source easy to find for the reader, and reproducing the full journal name is a more effective way to do this than guessing at the abbreviation (sometimes authors do this, and it makes it even more difficult for me to find that reference later).

But also: if it’s that reference and that reference alone you spell out, then that one reference looks inconsistent, like a mistake instead of a choice. And that’s just annoying.

Eventually, I was annoyed enough to go searching for a resource. There are so many out there meant to help writers, editors, and researchers, so there had to be one showing rules on journal abbreviations, not just listing a collection of journals that already had abbreviations.

And there is! Before I explain the LTWA, big shout-out to The NLM page explaining how abbreviations are created and common rules across journal names. The LTWA probably wouldn’t exist without you.

Basically, the LTWA, or the List of Title Word Abbreviations, functions as a database compiling words and their standardized title abbreviations across languages. Searching can be weird because, in many cases, the full word isn’t reproduced—for instance, typing “university” into the search bar yields no results, but typing “univ” shows a whole page. This is because, when possible, the LTWA prioritizes showing the roots of words that are common across languages to avoid repeat entries. “Universit-” covers the word for university in English, French, Latin, and Lithuanian.

If you’re new to searching the LTWA, try searching just the beginning of a word first. I also recommend limiting any search terms to four or five letters maximum.

You can use the word search at the bottom of the main LTWA page or download the whole thing as a PDF. Either way, save the resource somewhere accessible—it’s going to make verifying tricky references that much easier.

(Admittedly, still not as easy as hiring me—but still pretty easy).