Style and Resources

An informative explainer on abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms appears in Merriam-Webster online.

Names of institutions, organizations, diseases, programs, and projects are spelled out the first time they appear in a story. On subsequent mentions, use the abbreviated form. 

If in doubt, err on the side of including the abbreviation following the spelled-out full name. 

Do not include periods between letters in abbreviations (UCLA, CDC) unless their absence could cause confusion: U.S.

Do not enclose abbreviations in parentheses unless the term is an obscure one that readers might not recognize, but let clarity and narrative flow be your guide.

Examples:

What Will It Take to End Tuberculosis?

It’s about an ambitious project that, over the past decade, has brought new, patient-friendly treatments to some of the places hardest hit by the deadly global epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Patients who have participated in these studies told doctors and researchers that when they received their TB diagnosis, they were afraid.

Schizophrenia and Aging May Share a Biological Basis

The team called this coordinated set of changes the Synaptic Neuron and Astrocyte Program, or SNAP.

Please note: Some abbreviations, such as CDC, NIH, FDA appear in M-W as main entries; these are likely to be understood by our readers and may even stand alone in some cases.

And: Some medical journals are identified by their abbreviated titles: PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), BMJ (British Medical Journal).

HIV Drugs Show Promise in Averting Complications from Bacterial Infections

Research published Jan. 16 in PNAS sheds new light on this question and also hints at a possible treatment.

Options for styling abbreviations:

• The benefits of ERISA, or Employee Retirement Income Security Act, are familiar to many.
• The benefits of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, ERISA, are familiar to many.
• The benefits of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, are familiar to many.

Which faculty title to use depends on its context and relevance within a story and the preference of the faculty member. Consult your editor for additional guidance and exceptions.

Linking to HMS faculty:
In news stories, link faculty names to their HMS lab page or Catalyst profile.

Some HMS faculty have several titles: 
Consider relevance of titles within a given story. If there are more than two titles, sprinkle them throughout the story rather than stacking them all up in one sentence/paragraph.

Hierarchy of titles: 
HMS academic title, affiliate title, corporate title if context requires (e.g., faculty with a corporate position with MassGeneral Brigham or Beth Israel Lahey). 

NOTE: HMS faculty appointments are tied to affiliate hospitals, not corporate entities (as of March 2024).

Quad department chairs:
Always include department chair title and academic title for Quad department chairs.

Affiliate title examples:

• Staci Gruber, HMS associate professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital
• Adam Gaffney, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Cambridge Health Alliance
• S. Jean Emans, the HMS Mary Ellen Avery Professor of Pediatrics, Emerita, at Boston Children’s Hospital

Corporate title example:

• Tom Sequist, HMS professor of medicine and of health care policy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital but
• Tom Sequist, chief patient experience and equity officer at Mass General Brigham

Note: academic appointments are tied to hospitals, not corporate entities.

Professor of the practice title example:

• Mark Namchuk, director of therapeutics translation at HMS
• Mark Namchuk, professor of the practice in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS

Honorifics and degrees:

Do not use “Dr.” or other honorific (e.g., Mrs., Mr.) unless in quoted material or half-staff emails.

Do not include academic degrees in news stories, but if there is an exception, style as Jane Doc, MD ’95.

If requested by event planners, it is OK to include academic degrees on event announcements, programs, and collateral (posters, signage, etc.) for events such as the Alpert Symposium.

Capitalize a title when it immediately precedes a name:

• Harvard University Treasurer Timothy Barakett
• Dean George Q. Daley
• Professor Arlene Sharpe

Exception: appositive, for example, “the university’s treasurer, Timothy Barakett”

Lowercase a title when it follows a name or stands alone. It is preferable to have titles follow names for consistency and readability.

• Timothy Barakett, treasurer of Harvard; the treasurer
• George Q. Daley, dean of HMS; the dean
• David Reich, HMS professor of genetics; the professor

Exception: named professorships are always capitalized

Stephen Blacklow, the Gustavus Adolphus Pfeiffer Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS

NOTE: In the Dean’s Report, dean-level titles always appear before the name —  capitalized. Named professorships appear before other titles. Do not include titles in photo captions.

Lowercase emeritus unless it appears with a named professorship title

• Edward Guadagnoli, HMS professor of health care policy, emeritus 
• Joan Ruderman, the HMS Marion V. Nelson Professor of Cell Biology, Emerita

Include “part-time” if it is part of a faculty member’s title listed in MARS/Catalyst; check with Office for Faculty Affairs if you have questions

• Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, lecturer on cell biology, part-time, at HMS

Harvard faculty affiliations:

Use Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) if asked, but otherwise use HU or name the HU school or department associated with the faculty member or their lab. Consider the relevance of the department or program name to the story and the faculty member's preference.

Examples:

Now, a collaboration among researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard University has provided a glimpse into exactly how cells in the heart start beating.

Now, a collaboration among researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University has provided a glimpse into exactly how cells in the heart start beating.

Sources for faculty titles and affiliations:

Authoritative sources for faculty titles and affiliations: Catalyst, MARS, and the HU internal directory. 

PRO TIP 1: If a named professorship is in Catalyst or MARS, it is considered an HMS title, not an affiliate title.

PRO TIP 2: Not all institutions are appointing institutions; e.g., Dana-Farber funnels faculty appointments through the Brigham. Verify on Catalyst. In MARS, the academic title is associated with the appointing institution, not the hospital that is the faculty member's primary institution. 

Check with the Office for Faculty Affairs if you have questions or need verification of affiliation.

Example: 

Awards & Recognitions: March 2024

More information on faculty titles and departments available from OFA here.

See section on Blavatnik Institute for more on Quad faculty titles.

Use accent marks for personal names and place names as appropriate; check M-W and/or AP for guidance on words, such as cliché, that may need a diacritical mark in English.

The names of awards should be capitalized, including the word “award” when part of the actual name; e.g., the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Monthly awards page listing uses second reference style for affiliates.
Example: Maryam Asgari, HMS professor of dermatology at Mass General

The Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School comprises 11 preclinical departments on the HMS Quad.

In reporting on research done by HMS Quad-based faculty, reference Blavatnik as early in the story as possible: researchers in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School; Blavatnik Institute at HMS [as second reference if Harvard Medical School appears prior to the Blavatnik ID]

After this initial mention of Blavatnik, there is no need to repeat it throughout the story.

Example: Researchers from the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School helped organize the meeting and subsequent discussions

"We believe our findings may help explain the basic malfunction that drives loss of immune defenses with age," said senior study author Marcia Haigis, professor of cell biology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School."

For research done by both HMS Quad-based faculty and affiliate-based faculty, reference to the Blavatnik Institute should be attached to the first Quad-based faculty member identified in the story/release.

Example: Timothy Hammond, a research fellow in neurology in the lab of Beth Stevens at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s and first author of the study. Hammond’s team collaborated with the lab of Steven McCarroll, the Dorothy and Milton Flier Professor of Biomedical Science and Genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

Department names

Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School

Faculty titles

David Sinclair, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School

>>But named professorship titles do not include Blavatnik Institute as part of the title:

George Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School

Labs

Blavatnik Harvard Life Lab Longwood/Blavatnik Life Lab

HMS labs, initiatives, centers retain current names without Blavatnik ID: HiTS, HST, Sharpe Lab, and others

Administrative and academic units; organizations

Capitalize “School” and “University” only when they specifically refer to HMS (“the School”) and Harvard University (“the University”), respectively, but “our school,” “our university,” which are generic.

Do not capitalize “university” or “department” or other similar entities when modified by two or more institutional names: She attended Duke and Columbia universities.

Do not capitalize "center" on second reference; the Harvard Center for Genomics, but the center; Task Force on Minority Admissions, but “the task force”

Full titles of departments and divisions are capitalized

• Clifford Tabin, chair of the Department of Genetics, but Tabin is chair of the genetics department
• Houman Javedan, HMS assistant professor of medicine and clinical director for the Division of Aging at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Clinics within hospitals: keep lowercase unless it’s an officially named clinic

Committees, offices within the University

Cap when using the official name of the entity; lowercase otherwise:

Office of Student Affairs, but student affairs
Visiting Committee, but committee
The President and Fellows of Harvard College
HMS Quad; Quad

Do not include academic degrees in news stories unless called for in stories about alumni or stories where degrees are otherwise relevant.

Example: https://hms.harvard.edu/news/belonging-halls-medicine

Degrees may be included if requested in posters, event emails, letters, etc.

If included, all caps, no periods: MD, PhD; MMSc, MD-MPH; with year: MD ’20, PhD ’21

HMS Class of 2025; MD ’17

HSDM Alumni: Kal Amine, DMD ’07

Harvard’s guidelines for online content

Hyperlink best practice:

• All links should open in same window. This is the default in Word, and the formatting will carry over into Drupal
• Grab enough text to give meaningful context for screen readers; do not link on single words such as “here.”

Examples:

Adapted from a Beth Israel Deaconess news release. Link the entire sentence.

The findings, published April 6 in Nature, open new avenues to looking at this problem.

Do not enclose title in quotation marks; use initial cap and cap first word following a colon; also cap proper nouns. If the event sponsor already has a website and collateral materials, you may have to conform with the established style.

Behind Bars: Ethics and human rights in U.S. prisons

The following links include guidance on race, disability, age, size, gender, and sexuality and more. This is not an exhaustive list. It is always good to double-check current sources in this rapidly evolving style area!

Some AP guidance
Race-related coverage
Disabilities
Gender
Pregnant
Pronouns
Transgender coverage

Inclusive communication guides for health care & public health professionals
APA Style: Bias-free language
AMA-AAMC Center for Health Equity: Advancing health equity—A guide to language, narrative and concepts
CDC health equity guiding principles for inclusive communication
NIH Style Guide

Other guidance
BuzzFeed Style Guide
Conscious Style Guide
Diversity Style Guide
Trans Journalists Association
National Association of Black Journalists
Conscious Style Toolkit
Diversity Style Guides for Journalists

• Italicize gene, genus, and genus/species names: BRCA1; FOXP3; Salpingoeca rosetta (S. rosetta 2nd reference); Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans)
• Italicize publication titles (e.g., magazines, journals, newspapers, books, movies, podcasts); the New England Journal of Medicine; Code Switch

Style using source's preference; keep style used in quoted material. See AP guidance on foreign names here.

Do not use middle initials unless there are two people at HMS with the same name, e.g., Michael L. Rich and Michael O. Rich. OK to use middle initials in half-staffs or if an individual specifically requests it.

Diverging from AP style, all HMS publications use the series (Oxford) comma: I have two peaches, one apple, and three pears.
Apostrophe with possessive: HMS’ (not HMS’s)

Reasonably reliable sources for checking quotes include the Yale Book of Quotations (HU library), Quote Investigator (free online), and Wikiquote.

Note: For some quotes, it's almost impossible to know who said it or what the exact words were. Better to paraphrase without quotation marks if you cannot get authoritative confirmation.

“I never said most of the things I said.” — Yogi Berra [?]

Insert subheads (H3) in stories 600 words or longer; 70 characters, maximum 7 words 

Use sentence case (capitalize only first word and proper nouns) 

This guideline is flexible: If there are other elements in the story such as related articles, video, images, audio, subheads may not be needed. 

Use ET, Eastern Time [CT, Central; MT, Mountain; PT, Pacific]
2 p.m. ET, 5:30 p.m. ET, 2 – 5:30 p.m. ET, 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. ET

For international audiences, consider U.S. Eastern Time for greater clarity. 

Reference: National Institute of Standards and Technology