Formatting APS Journal Articles :: Special Cases
Authors or other scientists sometimes like to communicate things to an Editor in a public forum (most of the time, they want to inform the readers that another group has missed something vitally important or not given proper credit). The Letter to the Editor and the response by the Editor are edited, and a copy is sent to the respective writers. Authors of the letter do not get to see the response until the journal is published.
Also note that a Letter to the Editor must have a response. If there is no response, then you must query the Editor. This is also a good time to mention to them that they might want to contact the original authors of the paper under discussion and inform the original authors that their paper is going to be the topic of a Letter to the Editor.
Letters to the Editor are different from Point-Counterpoint articles in that they are unsolicited by the Editors and are composed of two different manuscripts that are run in together at proof stage (more specifically, at the Revised pages stage). Each manuscript has its own manuscript number, DOI number, correspondence, etc.
At proof stage, "Letter(s) to the Editor" is listed in the banner line of the article.
Author information is listed at the end of the article. This information has to be manually formatted so that it appears as follows:
«p»Full Author Name
«f»Another Author's Name
«f»Affiliation
«f»Postal Address
«f»E-mail: address (only for corresponding author)
«f»doi:10.1152.fullcitation (only has to be listed once)
The abstract is a reprint of the abstract of the paper in question.
There are no received dates.
All headers default to level 2 headers (with level 3 headers as necessary).
At proof stage, the Letter and the response are printed right after each other, so that both manuscripts run into each other on the same page. To indicate this, use the «runin» code after the «file» information at the start of the response.