A paper from our lab has gone online in a certain journal (unrelated to NPG). There’s a rather odd footnote attached to the second author’s name:
You won’t have much luck obtaining a ‘Plant Homeodomain Fellowship’: the first author tells me that he decoded the abbreviation ‘PHD’ at the proof stage, but an over-zealous copy editor thought it also applied to ‘PhD’.
Bloody amateurs. What do they teach these people?
Hilarious! Is it the final-final version or the final-online-but-might-still-be-changed-before-print version?
Oh dear.
I reckon they’ve got an algorithm that checks papers for undefined abbreviations and fills in a definition. If so, it clearly needs some weeding.
Oops. Find and replace can be a risky strategy! This reminds me of my friend’s thesis, which cited a 1994 paper by an author called Dr. Page. My friend’s supervisor chaged the reference marked (Page, 1994) to p. 1994, then left a note saying “this is clearly wrong, there is no page 1994 in your thesis”.
Haha! Brilliant, Cath. I don’t know if there’s further chance for editing, my colleague seemed to think not.
Matt, that was my guess. GIGO.
Subeditors are people too. Some of my best friends are subeditors.
Well Jen, if you know any at JBC perhaps you could have a word in their shell-like?
I know, I know, if they were any good they’d be working for NPG.
PHD=>*P*erhaps *H*esitating would *D*o
Jenny’s right. It’s also a matter of mindset. Copy editors tend to look at text as it is, not the way you imagine it might be. Only then will all (or nearly all) errors be picked up. Back in the day, I learned how to mark up text for editors and printers in the traditional manner, and this has been a godsend, especially when dealing with copy-edited mss and proofs of books. It’s a task that demands precision and adherence to the rules. Now that hot metal has gone the way of the dinosaurs people don’t have such skills, which, I think, can lead to mutual incomprehension between authors and copy editors.
Mmm. I do wonder how much scientific training copy editors have, though. Something like ‘PhD’ should be obvious, even without such training.
Well, Richard, it’s the things that seem obvious to you and me, and which everyone assumes to be right, which, on the 99th iteration, turn out to be something else entirely. Subeditors have to check these things. That’s what they’re for.
If one of the purposes of publication is communication, then the meaning needs to be assayed by one’s peers. If the peers come back and you have to explain that actually, that’s not what you wrote, then there’s a problem.
At Nature (and other Nature journals) our subeditors have to have a science degree (often they have PhDs or even PHDs;-) but this is not essential), a wide interest in science and strong English language skills. I think I’m safe to say this isn’t the kind of mistake they would make. Incidentally, at Nature the subeditors send authors and edited text (internally, we call it a pre-proof) so that matters of this sort can be sorted out straight away before they ever get to the typesetter.
We regularly conduct author experience surveys at the Nature journals: our subeditors and production staff receive lots of praise, so we hope we are doing OK and providing a good service to authors in helping them to communicate their message comprehensively, as opposed to “pointless fiddling”.
Via a blog written by a fellow editor (not of a scientific journal, but who like me appreciates the value of the sub) I learn of a piece in the Sunday Times about a subeditors’ strike. Here’s an excerpt:
If you want to see what life would be like without subeditors, just read The Canterbury Tales. My God, Chaucer was a sloppy writer: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote”? A good sub would have sorted that lot out in no time. Just ask William Shakespeare, who was one of the first writers to see what difference a bit of light subbing could make.
Would he have been quite so renowned as a playwright had Richard III stridden onto the stage and announced: “Now is the winter of our disco tents”? And it’s only thanks to the alertness of the Globe theatre subs desk that Henry V didn’t fight upon St Christine’s Day.
In the age of the computer and the blog, some people predict that subeditors will no longer be necessary. But computers can be so unreliable. You wouldn’t have spotted this before the subeditors’ strike, but it’s quite common for copy that’s been cut from one column to appear in another part of the paper, which was served on a bed of spinach. “My starter is cold,” I said to Geraldine. “Well, why don’t you complain?” she snapped.
“Calm down, dear,” I replied, looking round to make sure nobody had heard. “You know I don’t like to make a fuss.”
“Oh, Michael, you really are the giddy limit,” said Geraldine. “They’ve put us by the toilets again too.
“You know what your trouble is?” Geraldine went on, flicking discreetly through a copy of my latest book, Michael Winner’s Fat Pig Diet, still available from all leading bookshops.
“You’re just too backward in coming forward.”
“Perhaps if I asked them to put it in the microwave?” I wondered, calling for the waiter, which makes everything so difficult to read if a great chunk of somebody else’s work suddenly appears from nowhere /Queens Park Rangers 3 after extra time/
I haven’t done any sub-editing, but I have done quite a bit of language checking, and you do find yourself reading the text with a different mindset. You’re not interested in the argument, only whether the sentences make sense. So I can see this sort of mistake happening.
Oh, I’ve just remembered another occasion when a bit of sub-editing might have helped. The missing link between Creationism and Intelligent Design.
Sometimes subediting can get overzealous. I hear a certain (non-NPG) journal bans the word ‘tool’ on the dubious basis that it could be confused with a male appendage.
The same journal, I’m told, used to eschew any words of Greek derivation if a Latin equivalent could be found.
HAHA! So how do they cope with words like ‘anal’ and ‘sex’?
Those two words appeared in the title of an article in a certain journal that a previous boss of mine used to edit (in the context of Caenorhabditis). That article got a lot of hits, strangely.
Quite.
Indeed, over at ScienceBlogs, this post received a huge amount of views over the weekend.
Wow.
You’ve got to love medics, haven’t you? Your homework is to re-write the following in English:
A transmural tear occurred when pressure exceeded the rectal wall compliance at a fixed point of contact
This is hilarious!
As a chemistry-type editor at Nature I have noticed some really odd changes that have been made due to lack of chemistry background. The one that sticks most firmly in my mind was a find-and-replace conversion of ylide to yield.
I totally agree with you Bronwen,you give the exact answer I’ve expected.So what surely struck our mind is that theory of find and replace?