Does technical editing improve a paper? A systematic review
Martin Fenner
Monday, 21 April 2008 19:24 UTC
Technical editing is the process of improving the language and grammar of a paper (i.e. making it a good paper in the sense of this Journal Club) during the peer-review process. Surprisingly little literature exists on this topic, but I found this systematic review:
Wager E, Middleton P. Technical editing of research reports in biomedical journals. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007;(2):MR000002.
The authors looked at the effects of technical editing on the quality of peer-reviewed research papers. They identified 18 papers. The main findings are:
- Peer-review and editing increases the readability of a paper as measured by the Flesch Reading Ease Score
- Detailed author instructions improve a paper
- Structured abstracts can improve a paper
- Technical editing improves the accuracy of references
This is a very detailed review and worth reading. For a shorter text on the same subject, look at the 2002 JAMA article by the same authors.
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Replies
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Martin,
Umm, while having someone else edit your (one’s) writing helps (and according to this systematic review, it improves the readability of the writing “slightly”), I still think that the most efficacious route to good writing is for scientists to learn how to write effectively. I say this because, once they start to write more clearly they then begin to think more clearly about their research – and relying on editors by- passes this crucial step.Although I don’t want to continually refer back to my experiences, it may be instructive for folks out there to know that in the interdisciplinary classes that I teach, researchers must first explain their findings, share a draft of their articles, and answer clarifying questions. Through this process, there’s often a remarkable shift in the presenter’s perspective – away from secondary details – and toward the truly significant result. Once researchers can find the real focus of their stories, there’s a greater likelihood that the papers they write about will be logical, clear, precise and accessible. (I believe that the experience of writing for an interdisciplinary audience is good training for writing for their target audience – interested, educated general readers.)
Linda -
I think that the presentation of papers is invariably improved by peer-review, almost as an “aside”, because the author has to make the peer-reviewer “get” it – the author has been thinking about the paper for a year, give or take, whereas a busy reviewer has to absorb it in an hour – even for someone in a similar disciplie, this is not always easy, from what I hear.
I wonder if we run the risk of confounding two issues here? Although I agree with Linda that scientists can (and should!) learn to write in the ways she ably describes, I don’t think this necessarily means that they are any more likely to get those papers published. So long as the editor can discern the scientific result being conveyed, the paper will get into the peer-review system however poorly it is written. Often an editor already knows about the work from conferences or lab visits, and may not even feel the need to read the actual paper in a lot of detail, if he/she feels familar with the work. (I don’t mean professional editors here, I mean the vast majority of scientific journals, which use academic scientists, usually active researchers in the field, as editors—these editors are already much more like peers of the authors than journals such as Nature, Cell and Science, which employ professional editors).
A separate point, Martin—I feel the medical literature is slightly different. It is on the whole better-written than the cell/molecular/systems biology research literature, in my subjective and probably skewed experience of it. Maybe it is because medical research has a built-in context of general interest (the medical condition) to which the result can be tied, compared with your typical structural biology or immunology paper.
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Maxine, interesting point about the medical literature often being better-written. I had considered a recent clinical paper for this journal club, but thought that it would be strange reading for you folks. The medical literature has additional rules to follow, for example CONSORT for the reporting of clinical trials. Part of the reason to pick that paper was that it was written with the help of a medical writer.
Linda, this paper was just a first step for me to find more systematic literature on the topic of well-written papers. I would for example be interested whether well-written papers are read or cited more often. And your point about the interdisciplinary audience is interesting. Following this argument, one would assume that the more general science journals such as Nature or Science contain more well-written papers than the specialist journals.
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A couple of quick comments:
Full-time professional editors and scientist-editors of specialty journals all work with reviewers, and they hopefully take reviewer comments seriously. Although I don’t have statistics to back it up, reviewers may pay less attention to poorly written papers and may even resent having to plow through them, leading to negative bias.
More importantly, since reviewers of interdisciplinary papers must contend with parts of manuscripts that are outside their fields, it is especially important that this ‘alien’ material be communicated clearly to avoid misunderstanding.
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