On the improbability of common ground

I had a cheap laugh at an anonymous sub-editor’s expense the other day, and the inestimable Jenny quite rightly pointed out to me that editing, subediting and copyediting are actually high-pressure jobs, and mistakes get made (Rohn, J., personal communication).

Much of the time, scientists are to blame. Many scientists can not write clearly or succinctly, many can in their native tongue but not in English, and I suspect that the vast majority struggle of time-poor scientists with word limits (q.v. Pascal and others ).

And the copyeditors have to wade through the treacle of clumsy prose, malapropisms and mis-placed apostrophe’s, all to a strict deadline. It is evitable that mistakes will be made. There are dozens of manuscripts to process, proofmarks to decipher and screaming editors to placate. At this stage of the scientific process the content, the conclusions and the implications of the current work on the screen are irrelevant.

But from the point of view of the author, the scientist(s) who produced the paper, at this instant this paper is the most important thing in their life. It is the culmination of maybe three years’ work. On it depends grants, contract renewals, tenure, livelihood. It is inevitable that perfection is demanded.

To an editor, it may appear that this manuscript has been dashed off in an afternoon.

We know that is not true: it has been written and re-written numerous times. Words, lines, paragraphs have been typed, re-arranged, substituted, deleted, re-typed and shoe-horned into a seemingly draconian character restriction. Weeks have been spent on one sentence, as the manuscript crosses the Atlantic a dozen times, where each word serves a specific purpose, to deliver a precise meaning. And then it has faced the ennui of an Editor, and the wrath of hostile reviewers; it has returned for more crafting; a paragraph is lost here, and two new ones go there, this figure is enlarged at the expense of a table.

In the proofs, or if we’re really unlucky after the proofs have been sent back, one word gets changed, a comma is deleted or added, and that sentence fails to convey the precise sense the author intended. A figure is reduced so much it makes no sense, or is buried after the Materials and Methods section. And the author’s peers collar him at the next conference and demand to know what the hell he was thinking when he wrote that?

My latest JMB paper went online early December, but remained as a ‘corrected proof’ for nearly three months because the figures were all in the Materials and Methods section; four pages of dense text before a single figure, all following the results they illustrate. That makes Mike’s “Plant Homeodomain Fellowship” look positively cheery.

When I cock up an experiment, and have to repeat it, it’s a bloody pain. But I’ll do it, because it has to be right, and I (and my boss, and the reviewers) expect nothing less. If it’s not technically correct, then I do it again.

Scientists get very protective of their papers, with good reason. They are the currency of research, and we want, we need them to be perfect. Which is why sometimes, maybe, we’re not entirely rational about them.