As a researcher and therefore a reader of papers, I often encounter poorly written papers, full of grammatical and spelling errors. Of course, one cannot fully blame the authors -- many researchers are not native english speakers (myself included), and some only speak english at a very basic level, or not at all. However, some publication platforms (journals, magazines, transactions and so on) have editors listed: a group of people that tends to change per issue or a set of issues. My impression was that editors edit the papers for publication, mainly focussing on formatting and language (with feedback from authors, of course).
However, reading papers from a Lecture Notes in Computer Science issue, I'm quite certain that language isn't part of what editors do. Some articles, especially those that come from Workshop and Conference proceedings, often lack editing, sometimes to the extent that the paper is (for me, at least) no longer understandable. However, I've even noticed this problem for Journals. In addition, my reading experience seems to indicate that the problem is increasing, which would be a rather troubling fact that could be addressed by editors or by reviewers. I expected this to be addressed by reviewers; the quality of text is important to the correct communication of information. On the other hand, it may be unfair to non-native speakers to consider language in the review process.
Thus, my question actually consists of two parts:
1. What is the 'job description' of an editor?
2. How can the research community as a whole (authors, reviewers, PCs, readers, editors, ...) improve the situation?
An editor is someone who has a strong command of language and also a good knowledge in the area he/she works with. Such skills are not "gifts" because, as every professional, an editor has to take substantial training and seeks continuous education. You will found editors' job description at http://www.amwa.org/ or http://www.councilscienceeditors.org, and also at http://www.bels.org/.
I believe that most of scientists, specially in developing countries (which is my case), should pay more attention in format, language and style of their paper, unfortunately, the lack of "worry" leads to rejection!
I Hope this helps!
An editor is someone who has a strong command of language and also a good knowledge in the area he/she works with. Such skills are not "gifts" because, as every professional, an editor has to take substantial training and seeks continuous education. You will found editors' job description at http://www.amwa.org/ or http://www.councilscienceeditors.org, and also at http://www.bels.org/.
I believe that most of scientists, specially in developing countries (which is my case), should pay more attention in format, language and style of their paper, unfortunately, the lack of "worry" leads to rejection!
I Hope this helps!
The language of a paper is part of the author's work, native speaker or not. The editors of a publication, in contrast to copy-editors, cannot revise all the papers they receive to make them publishable. The editor's responsibility, though, is to reject poorly written papers (part of a 'job description').
Editors need a lot of experience to act effectively and foster useful publications. Therefore, opportunities for training and instruction of editing processes and best practices, which might not be the same for all areas of academics, is needed.
Okay, so an editor more has the task of a programme chair, organizing reviews and determining the final decision, rather than a copy-editing task. That seems like a satisfactory answer, but it still leaves me with the second part of the question -- how can the situation be improved?
A lot of the papers I see just need a quick grammar or consistency check. For example, the last two papers I read (one from the IEEE Systems Journal, one from LNCS) both mixed up their own references (citing [5] where [6] should be cited, etc.). Of course, ideally, these kinds of mix-ups are noticed in the review process, but I'm wondering if there is any way to handle those errors that slip through. Are there some kind of generally accepted policies for this?
Should reviewers (especially for conferences and workshops, where there usually isn't an 'accept with minor revisions' option) always force authors to correct their language? This would work, but it would create a very strong boundary. Many papers I read may have errors, but they are understandable and often have great and novel ideas.
1. What is the 'job description' of an editor?
More often than not; to lend their name, status and recognition to the journal in order to increase its perceived reputation.
2. How can the research community as a whole (authors, reviewers, PCs, readers, editors, ...) improve the situation? Journals can work with copyeditors who are responsible to the language quality of the published articles. In addition, a good amount of publishers offer proofreading and copyediting services or link from their homepage to such services. I think that it is mainly the author's responsiblity to proofread their submitted articles and journals should not publish manuscripts with flawed English. The main question is that who will pay the costs of correcting the language. An author often does not have the resources for that simply because hu's from a third world country, or does not have enough income for paying for these kind of services (i think that PhD students, VAPs, external lecturers and in general, scholars in the begining of their carriers often find themselfs in this situation).
I think that it would be good that an institution with which the non-native speaking author is affiliated could pay for language editing (this is not gonna happen). But native speakers should care enough about their own manuscripts to edit and polish the language.
There seems to be a bit of misunderstanding in the question on what editing means. The editor-in-chief and member of the editorial board are often professors or distinguished members in the field of the journal, and they certainly won't copyedit your grammatical mistakes.
Rather, they edit the journal itself, communicate with authors and reviewers, form a decision whether an article fits into the journal, and collect articles into issues. Basically they define a journal and are the most vital people there.
For copy-editing: Some good journals have a production staff that corrects the papers. Reviewers can point out mistakes and make sure that in later review iterations the errors are fixed, and editors can decide that the paper is not publishable in its current form to enforce correction.
Springer LNCS is not a journal but a collection of papers (@incollection in BibTeX), and the book editor is most probably the TPC chair(s). Those papers are fully author-edited, Springer staff probably only checks for major printing problems like garbed font in figures, pre-existing header or footers, etc. Finally, in conference papers, the authors produce the camera-ready version themselves, and the job of the publisher is mainly whether your paper is in A4 or letter format and change it when necessary. Proceedings and collections are just papers glued together to a volume, they are only edited at the "book-level."
In the last two categories it clearly shows that the papers would benefit from copy-editing, but there it is lastly in the responsibility of the authors to improve their paper. If no one can understand their papers they also have no impact. If you have a strong enough community you could just publish in your native language, in some years we will see many publications in Chinese, it would be good to start learning early ;-)
I have specialized as a copy editor in working with graduate students and faculty who are non-native English speakers for over 20 years. Understanding the challenges that people from different cultures have with English has helped me improve the grammar, punctuation, and flow of papers, dissertations, and books without removing the voice of the author. To improve the quality of manuscripts, a copy editor is needed well before a manuscript is submitted for publication or, at the very least, between basic acceptance of a manuscript and its final version.
i have been a review editor, sit on several editorial boards - and review for over 30 international peer-review journals. The journals that I most prefer working with tend to have similar properties that cluster i.e. competent and well known Editor's in Chief, a series of specialist sub-editors (rather than all the 'power' being in the hands of a sole editor), established international editorial advisory boards, good, sustained impact factors, usually quite a established history, good 'general' reputation, more than 2 reviewers per manuscript, feedback to reviewers so they can compare notes, good production values, early access (in press) facilities, are not generally fee-charging open access etc. It could be argued that only submitting to journals such as these doesn't assist newly emerging journals or 'novice' researchers - but I suppose my point is - look for similar journal attributes where you can and, in the absence of these, be more wary and vigilant. Often, when I submit manuscripts, I aim for the 'highest' quality/reputation journal and, even if they do not get accepted - there is an expectation that I will benefit from good quality review feedback to improve the quality of my manuscript.
Very many Journal; competitions
No proper selection of reviewers/ reviewers unpaid
these issues may compromise on quality
I believe the there should be a parameter to select editors/reviewers: because these are the people who can help in publishing quality scientific communications
Ramana - this may be true to a certain extent - that some journals will struggle to find good quality reviewers and/or editors - but that is usually the case with 'non-established' journals. That said, even with quality and established journals, it is not uncommon to come across poor reviewers. It is less likely, however, that the editors are poor as well - just that they are too busy to notice that 'some slip through the system'!!
Language editing in my view should be sole responsibility of the journal, as each journal has its own style and standards. We should expect from contributors only an interesting reserach work, and we could help promising authors with the rest. This is the practice in our journal, the Bulgarian Journal of Veterinary Medicine
I think this is the best question that correlates very well with the current status: Many journal publishers have evolved recruiting EDITORIAL members from around the world.
I have this feeling that an EDITOR has in him the adequate knowledge and experience on the what to evaluate in a paper submitted to a journal. He is the person that decides whether a paper should further go for a review or not.
He should be an expert in a broad area of research. If his role is properly assigned the scientific content in the journal certainly improves.
EDITOR is the BEST REVIEWER
I now quote a reference to add to my arguement that NEJM that has the highest IMPACT makes sure that inityially each paper is first screened by an EDITOR.
Supposedly only those papers that get a nod from EDITOR goes to REVIEWING
i believe that THAT MAKES SENSE.
Selection of papers, choice of reviewers and a decision on a paper are all the jobs in hand of editor.
Quality of journal certainly depends on both the editor and reviewers
"Zoology and Ecology" from Taylor and Francis so far is also helping authors with the language editing (not know for how long).
It is not the Editor business to check language, at least not the Editor's in Chief, or Section editor.
"...my reading experience seems to indicate that the problem is increasing, which would be a rather troubling fact that could be addressed by editors or by reviewers. I expected this to be addressed by reviewers; the quality of text is important to the correct communication of information"
Unfortunately, I believe you are right. The _average_ quality of current scientific papers, both with respect to language and scientific contents, is certainly lower than one or two decades ago.
On the other hand, I don't think that the quality of established and well-respected journals has deteriorated. Given the large increase in number of journals and the lowering of their average standards, we now need to become more selective on what we read (this is already happening - studies indicate that scientists now read fewer papers than they used to years ago). On the Internet, we generally expect good quality of news from BBC World, CNN and a few other established sites, but we don't expect millions of other web sites to hold the same quality, and don't bother to read them. We need to do the same with scientific literature. It is of course unfortunate, but reality has changed, and we must adapt to it.
On the subject of editors' and reviewers' duties, the traditional model is to have a scientific editor, who is actually a factotum and takes care of more or less everything, including language editing. Language editing is also a duty of reviewers (within limits and capabilities).
I am familiar with commercial technical documentation (of the highly technical kind, not user manuals of consumer products), and therefore can compare its processes and roles. A document is written by a professional technical writer in close cooperation with the technicians who developed a product/feature (language and technical editing by the technical writer is already involved at this stage). Internal reviews are carried out within this group until the document is regarded as satisfactory. It then goes to a language editor. This editor must be very good with language, but is not expected to understand all the technical intricacies. Finally, it is examined by a panel of verifiers with the task of technically verifying and testing the contents (in a way, similar to reviewers). Documents may need to be sent back to the technicians and technical writer, and must pass through the same process again. This is of course very expensive compared to scientific publishing.
The role of language editor is usually missing in traditional scientific journal publishing. It is present in scientific book publishing by certain commercial publishers. It would be highly desirable to have a specialized language editor also for journals, but of course this significantly increases costs.
Dear Colleagues, You may find this contribution related to the topic (anyhow interesting IMHO):
http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002
Kind regards, Balázs
Editors main jobs are to follow a strict peer-reviewing process through learned and devoted / expert reviewers, selection of qualified reviewers for this process, ask reviewers to make good changes with tools and tracks and pass valuable suggestions / comments for improving a paper and reject low quality papers, appoint an english proof reader, have support of cross-reference manager and plagiarism checker, finally accept only quality papers, with help of editorial board members and all links and resources attract quality papers to the journal, maintain regularity of issues being published, all papers cannot be edited by editors but where felt so must be done.
Language and format of the paper makes any paper representable for which editors must have good hold on language. Along with this he/ she must follow a strict peer reviewing process. For established journal a good editor with the above mandatory skills is an asset.
My colleagues and I began informally editing papers for our ESL colleagues years ago, after noting that many solid experimental papers were getting rejected from journals solely on the basis of language alone. We now operate a full-fledged editing service for researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences, while maintaining our primary careers as full-time researchers and tenure-track faculty.
We are all part of a global scientific community. In service to our discipline, we (i.e., most active scientists) regularly peer-review papers. Extending this kind of scientific service to include language editing would also do much to advance scientific knowledge.
Jessica
http://www.evelynben.com/
Editor is responsible for publishing all good papers, following a rejection rate and make achieve IF of any journal, his / her links, resources and knowledge and wide horizon is the key to success
I think, authors are the pillows of any journal, not the editor. Editor just make some judgements... When authors are poor, I mean their papers are poor, then no chance that Editor will help.
Falcon Scientific Editing will be happy to edit your abstract for FREE so that you can determine what level of language editing service you require. Then, we can provide you with a quote for the remainder of your manuscript/paper. We also offer translation, illustration, and formatting services. Feel free to contact us at [email protected].
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