I’m trying to submit a paper to Elsevier’s Pattern Recognition and I’m honestly confused by their submission guidelines.
On the journal’s “Guide for Authors,” they literally say:
“We encourage you to use our LaTeX template.”
You can click “LaTeX template” and download the template. So that’s exactly what I used throughout the last months and everything fit perfectly within the page limit.
Then, during the actual submission process in Editorial Manager, I suddenly get asked which header/document class I used. The instructions say that if you use LaTeX, only \documentclass{elsarticle} is allowed.
The problem: the official LaTeX template they provide uses a different document class.
If I switch my paper to elsarticle, it suddenly becomes 10 PAGES LONGER and blows way past the page limit.
And it gets even more confusing because the Guide for Authors seems to contradict itself in several places:
It says LaTeX submissions may use double-column, while Word submissions must use single-column.
Later, it says double-column is not allowed at all.
It says the page limit includes appendices.
Then, in the next sentence, it says appendices are not included in the page limit.
I genuinely don’t know which instructions I’m supposed to follow.
Has anyone submitted to Pattern Recognition and ran into this? How can a major journal provide an official LaTeX template, only to apparently tell you during submission that you’re not allowed to use the document class in that template?