Writing manuscripts for American Chemical Society journals with LaTeX: two custom modifications for the achemso style package

Introduction

The American Chemical Society (ACS) encourages authors to use the achemso style package when submitting manuscripts written with LaTeX. However, when preparing my most recent paper for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), I noticed that two important features were missing:

• Page numbers, figure numbers etc. in the Supporting Information must start with the letter S, which achemso does not support by default.
• There is no environment for a data availability statement.

In this post, I want to share what I did to solve these issues, also in the hope that others might find the information helpful.

The solutions

Numbering with letter S prepended

Although achemso supports the option manuscript=suppinfo, numbers do not include the letter S as required by ACS journals. As a workaround, one can add the following in the preamble of the document (thanks to José Alberto Guerrero-Cruz and Thomas Bondo Pedersen at the University of Oslo for making me aware of this simple solution!):

\SectionNumbersOn
\renewcommand{\theequation}{S\arabic{equation}}
\renewcommand{\thesection}{S\arabic{section}}
\renewcommand{\thepage}{S\arabic{page}}
\renewcommand{\thetable}{S\arabic{table}}
\renewcommand{\thefigure}{S\arabic{figure}}

A quick explanation of the lines above: The command \theequation will print the equation number. By default, this is just a number representing the value of the counter equation. We can overwrite the original definition of \theequation with our own definition, which consists of the letter “S” followed by the numerical representation of the equation counter. To use lowercase letters instead of numbers, one can e.g. use \alph instead of \arabic. For the other cases (section numbers, page numbers, table numbers, figure numbers), everything works analogously.

Data availability statement

In order to create a new environment for the data availability statement, I copied the supporting information environment included in achemso to the preamble of the document and modified it slightly:

\makeatletter
\newenvironment{datastatement}{%
\acs@section*{\datastatementname}%
}{}
\newcommand*\datastatementname{Data Availability Statement}
\makeatother

The command \makeatletter is necessary because of the \acs@section macro, which contains the letter @. Without \makeatletter, @ is not allowed in macro names. With the final \makeatother, @ becomes again a special character.

In the main part of the document, one can then type

\begin{datastatement}
% Content of the statement goes here
\end{datastatement}

to add a data availability statement.