"Publish and prosper" is a series of posts about tips for researchers whose first language is not English but who submit papers to journals published in English. The series touches upon not only writing (spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, and style) but everything else relevant to publishing research papers that journal editors wish their authors knew.

1. Use a slash to indicate a non-calendar (fiscal, academic, agricultural, etc.) year

2. Field experiments, especially those that involve growing crops, frequently span two successive calendar years; a crop may be sown in October, for example, and harvested in the following April. Many data sets in the public domain, especially those related to economics, are organized in terms of fiscal years, and educational institutes too have their academic year; neither a fiscal year nor an academic year corresponds to a calendar year.

3. A common convention in such cases is to use a slash (variously known as virgule, solidus, diagonal, separator, etc.) to separate the two years, as in 2010/11 or 2011/12, with the second year reduced to the last two digits where appropriate. To indicate a period or duration of two years or longer, the en dash is used between the starting year and the closing year, as in 2001/02-2010/11 to mark the decade.

4. Fine typography distinguishes between the virgule , which is typically used in fractions (¼, ½, and ¾ for example) and makes a 45° degree angle to the horizontal, and the solidus , which is more upright and used as a separator. However, fractions are virtually never used in research papers, and you can safely use the slash from the keyboard for the purpose described in this post.

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