When you’re choosing an English editing service for your research paper, focus on quality, reliability, speed, price, etc. We explore all these factors in the current article, giving you tips on how to judge them when you browse among editing services.
Quality
A research paper can represent months or even years of hard work, so don’t take any risks regarding the quality of editing. Look for an editing service that can polish your manuscript to the standards of top journals in your field, ensuring that your findings stand out.
Indicators of editing quality
When everyone claims to be the best, use these indicators to sift out empty claims
- Number of subject matter experts: A single editor can’t be an expert in virology and nuclear physics. Look for companies with a large pool of subject matter experts, so that your manuscript can be matched to an editor who understands your research as well as academic conventions in your field. Editage, for instance, has a pool of over 3000 subject matter experts.
- Partners: Who would be better judges of quality than the journals, publishers, or research societies who publish your research papers? An editing service provider who has partnered with and is trusted by leading journals, publishers, research societies, and universities is likely to consistently produce high-quality editing. Take the example of Editage, who has partnered with BMJ and Science.
- Samples: Go through sample edits provided by each editing service to judge the quality of the final edited paper. Don’t just look at the number of changes, but also check if the editor has explained major changes or provided useful suggestions to improve your writing. Also, many editing service providers will be happy to do a small sample edit on your own paper (around 200-400 words) for you to judge how useful their service will be to you personally.
Speed
Researchers often have tight timelines for submission and resubmission. Choose an editing service that can fit within your schedule. Ideally, they should offer you a range of timelines for you to choose from.
- Pro Tip: If you’re being offered an impossibly fast timeline, like 3 hours for 10,000 words, it’s likely that your editing is being done by AI, even if the editing company doesn’t disclose they’re using AI.
Price
Your research budget is already stretched thin to cover the basic expenses of collecting and analyzing your data. Look for an editing service provider that transparently offers a range of prices, based on level of edit and turnaround time. They also will work with you to budget for larger documents or for a series of documents.
Again, like I mentioned above, if anyone offers you an absurdly low price, they’re probably running your paper through a free LLM like ChatGPT, without any human checks. See this useful comparison of ChatGPT versus a human expert editor.
Reliability
A company may promise you the moon but deliver you a cheap plastic model, 10 days late. Look for editing services that have a strong and robust quality and delivery guarantee. Wiley Editing Services, for example, states their commitment to quality and on-time delivery right on their homepage. In fact, they promise that if there is any delay on their end, they will refund you your entire payment.
Formatting
Editing and formatting go hand in hand. If your target journal has a word limit for the abstract or different sections, this is best addressed while editing. It’s always better to get your manuscript formatted during the editing process, rather than later. For example, your target journal has a 2000-word limit but also requires citations as superscript numbers. Just by reformatting your author-date citations, your editor has already cut out 100+ words from your main text. It’s a smart idea to choose an editing service that includes manuscript formatting.
Which editing services offer free manuscript formatting?
Both Editage and Taylor & Francis Editing Services offer free manuscript formatting with all 3 levels of editing they provide.
Post-editing Support
Less than .1% of author get their manuscripts accepted with no changes at the first journal of their choice. For everyone else, getting a paper published means multiple rounds of peer review and revisions, and probably resubmitting your paper to multiple journals and having to reformat it. That’s why researchers must choose an editing service with adequate post-editing support.
Which editing services provide good post-editing support?
As an example of good post-editing support for authors, Editage offers
- multiple rounds of free or heavily discounted re-editing
- unlimited Q&A with your editor, and
- a specialized response crosscheck service to confirm whether you’ve adequately responded to all peer reviewer comments
Sage Author Services too offers unlimited re-edits for 365 days, up to 20% of the original word count.
Security and Confidentiality
Data security and confidentiality are absolutely essential when you’re choosing an editing service. Data breaches can jeopardize your research project, lead to your ideas getting scooped, and also affect your funding. Never choose an editing service provider that isn’t at least ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified.
Which editing companies take data security seriously?
- Editage uses ISO/IEC 27001:2022, ISO 17100 and ISO 18587 certified security systems.
- Wiley Editing Services has ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified IT systems.
- Sage Author Services has secure servers for authors and their research data.
- For all three, editors sign comprehensive and binding non-disclosure agreements before they are allowed to start work.
