In OR literature, what are the general capitalization rules

Question

I am confused on reading some scientific OR literature. This includes textbooks and also some journal papers. There seem to be different capitalization guidelines adopted.

General guidelines seem to be here and from there it states:

Each discipline has its own specific conventions for determining which terms should be capitalized. In general, scientific writing tends to minimize capitalized nouns.

Hence my query on OR Stackexchange.

It is quite clear that Table 4 and Figure 3 need capitalization. What about something more OR specific, like say: Consider graph G=(V,A). Should G of the graph not be capitalized there since it refers to a specific graph and is a proper noun? Also, what about: Referring to Constraint (3), it can be seen that... Is it right that C of constraint is capitalized? What about Suppose total flow into Customer i or Suppose total flow into Node i? Is it correct that customer and node are capitalized?

Is there some widely accepted textbook writing/scientific writing guidelines for OR type work?

Answer 1

I think OR literature follows the general English capitalization rules, and I think your reference explains it well.

• You should capitalize proper names (also known as proper nouns), when you make reference to a previously defined object such as Graph 10, Figure 3 or Customer i. The words Graph, Figure and Customer are essential parts of the name as the indexes 10, 3 and i cannot stand by themselves.

• In the sentences, consider a nonnegative variable x and the graph G=(V,A), the defined objects are given the short names x and G, respectively. The words variable and graph are not part of the name, and you will see references without them such as 2x and the diameter of G.