FormatMyManuscript

About Us

I’m Ayush Shah, MD. I’m a PGY-1 resident in Vascular Surgery, and before that I was a medical student with a folder of half-finished manuscripts and no idea how much of my life formatting was about to consume.

I remember specifically needing to meet a deadline for a paper, and the only task I had left was to format the paper for submission. Having to go through a 31-page "Author Instructions" guide infuriates me to this day. And what's even worse is that these formatting requirements change for every journal. I spent four hours moving affiliations into superscripts, rebuilding the reference list in the house style, and re-counting the abstract. All for the journal to desk-reject it for a structural requirement I’d missed on page nine of the author instructions.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. The research is hard, and it should be. The writing is hard, and it should be. But then there’s a third thing — a checklist of margins, heading levels, author credential formatting, keyword minimums, reference styles, word limits — that has nothing to do with your science and still eats an entire evening you didn’t have.

I kept thinking: this is a solved problem pretending to be an unsolved one. Every one of those rules is written down. They’re just written down in a different place, in a different order, for every journal.

So I started encoding them.

What FormatMyManuscript.com actually is

It’s a guided form. You pick your target journal and article type, you fill in your manuscript section by section, and it gives you back a submission-ready .docx built to that journal’s requirements. It flags the things that will get you bounced — abstract over the word limit, too few keywords, more authors than the journal allows — while you can still fix them.

It is deliberately not an AI writing tool. Every formatting rule is written as hard code from the journal’s own author instructions. No language model reads your manuscript, rewrites your sentences, or evaluates your science. That was non-negotiable for me: I wasn’t going to build something I wouldn’t put my own unpublished data into.

For the same reason, your manuscript isn’t kept. Your draft lives in your browser while you work. When you generate a document, it’s formatted and handed back — not filed away in a database for us to look at later. Our Privacy Policy describes exactly what happens, including the parts most large companies leave vague.

Who’s behind it

It’s me and a small team of people who help build and maintain the journal templates. I’m still a resident. I still write papers. Every journal we add, I add because someone — often me — needed it.

We’re early, and we’re honest about that. The library grows journal by journal, mostly because a researcher emails and tells us what’s missing. If your journal isn’t there yet, tell us — that’s genuinely how the roadmap gets set.

What I want this to be

Formatting shouldn’t take longer than writing. It shouldn’t cost you a weekend, and it shouldn’t be the reason a good paper gets sent back before an editor reads a word of it.

Your findings belong in the manuscript — not lost in the formatting.

— Ayush D. Shah, MD
Vascular Surgery resident · Chief Academic Officer, FormatMyManuscript.com