The upload screen looks compact, but each option changes specific editorial decisions further down the line. This article unpacks every one of them so you can pick deliberately rather than by guesswork.
Style guides
A style guide is the published reference that an academic field uses to standardise how writers handle citations, references, headings, capitalisation, number formatting, abbreviations, and the long tail of small consistency rules that turn a draft into a finished manuscript. Different fields prefer different guides. Picking the one your work targets tells the editor which rules to apply.
RightMyWork supports 10 citation styles. A brief tour (Chicago covers three of them, grouped together below):
APA 7th edition
Common in psychology, education, the social sciences, communications, business, and nursing. Uses author-date in-text citations and a reference list. The 7th edition is the current one and differs from earlier editions in several details, so the engine targets 7th specifically.
MLA 9th edition
Standard across the humanities, including literature, languages, philosophy, and many film and cultural studies programmes. Uses author-page in-text citations and a Works Cited list. MLA 9 is the current edition.
Harvard
An umbrella label rather than a single published manual. Many universities and journals publish their own house Harvard guide, with shared core conventions of author-date citation and a reference list. RightMyWork applies the most widely adopted core conventions, which align with the major published variants.
Chicago Manual of Style 18th
Chicago carries two citation systems, and you pick whichever your field uses. Author-Date puts author-date citations in parentheses with a reference list and suits the social sciences and interdisciplinary work. Notes-Bibliography uses numbered footnotes or endnotes paired with a bibliography and suits history, the arts, and many humanities subfields. A general option is also available for nonfiction with no field-specific style, applying CMOS conventions broadly without academic citation enforcement. The 18th edition is current.
OSCOLA 5th edition
The Oxford Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities is the dominant style for UK and Commonwealth legal writing. Uses footnotes for citations and a bibliography. OSCOLA 5 is the current edition.
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers style is standard across electrical engineering, computer science, and adjacent technical fields. Numeric in-text citations in square brackets paired with a numbered reference list in citation order.
Vancouver 2nd edition
Developed for biomedical and clinical literature. Numeric in-text citations paired with a numbered reference list. The current edition is the 2nd.
AMA 11th edition
The American Medical Association style is the dominant style across US medical journals. Numeric superscript in-text citations and a numbered reference list. AMA 11 is current.
A None option is not a style guide: it turns off citation-style enforcement entirely and applies only the conventions of your chosen English variant.
English variants
Four variants are supported. Each one controls spelling, idiom, and small grammatical preferences that differ across the English-speaking world.
- US English uses American spelling (color, organize, defense), American date order (month, day, year), and American conventions around quotation marks.
- UK English uses British spelling (colour, organise, defence), day-month-year date order, and British conventions around quotation marks.
- Australian English follows the Macquarie and Style Manual conventions used in Australian academic and government writing. Mostly aligned with UK forms but with specific exceptions.
- Canadian English follows Canadian published conventions, which sit between UK and US in spelling and idiom and have their own settled patterns.
Punctuation style
Two choices: US punctuation or UK punctuation. The difference is mostly about quotation marks. US punctuation uses double quotes as the primary mark and places commas and periods inside the closing quote regardless of whether they belong to the quoted material. UK punctuation prefers single quotes as the primary mark and places punctuation outside the closing quote unless the punctuation is part of the quoted material itself.
Punctuation style is separate from English variant on purpose. Some writers work in UK English but follow US punctuation conventions because their target journal prefers it, or vice versa. Set each option to whatever the publication you are aiming for actually wants.
Serial comma
The serial comma, sometimes called the Oxford comma, is the comma before and or orin a list of three or more items. The default for each style guide differs. APA and Chicago use it. Some journalistic styles and certain newspaper traditions omit it. The toggle on the upload screen lets you override your style guide’s default when you have a specific requirement.
Editorial comments
When this is on, the editor inserts Word comments alongside its tracked changes to explain why it made each judgement call: why a citation looked off, why a clearer phrasing was suggested, where it noticed a structural inconsistency across the document. The comments are a teaching tool as much as an editorial one. With comments off, you receive a quieter document containing only the tracked changes. The quality of the edits themselves does not change either way.
Citation handling for Zotero and Mendeley
If your draft was written using a reference manager such as Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote, your citations are not plain text. They are field codes that the manager updates when you change citation styles or edit your library. RightMyWork preserves those field codes by default. The editor reads around them and improves the sentence without touching the field itself. Your manager links continue to work after the edit.
While the fields are preserved, an Edit inside citation fields option controls whether the editor reaches into the field codes themselves. With it off, the citations are left exactly as your manager wrote them and the editor only touches the surrounding sentence. With it on, the editor inserts tracked changes inside the field, fixing formatting while keeping the field live. It never changes the author or the year, because your reference manager owns those. One caution: because the field still updates from your library, refresh your citations in the manager only after you have reviewed and accepted the tracked changes, not before.
An optional flatten setting lets you ask the editor to convert citation fields to plain text first. This frees the editor to revise full sentences more aggressively, including the wording around the citation. The trade-off is that your manager links become static. Most writers leave the flatten option off and pick it only when they are submitting a final version.
Autofill missing reference details
Reference lists routinely have gaps: a missing DOI, an unfilled page range, a publisher field left blank, a journal volume that did not survive the import. The Manuscript+ autofill option asks the editor to look those gaps up against authoritative metadata and write the verified details back into the bibliography. Entries that cannot be verified are left alone and flagged for review. Nothing is fabricated. Autofill is available on the Manuscript+ tier and above.
Putting it together
Style guide, English variant, and punctuation style are the three settings that shape almost every editorial decision. Serial comma and comments fine-tune the surface. Citation handling and autofill change how references are treated. Choosing the right combination once at the start saves you from making small corrections across the whole document later.
If you are still unsure which combination to pick, the Getting Started article has a recommended default for first-time users.