Abstract
BackgroundEnglish editing services are effective for improving manuscript quality as well as providing learning opportunities for non-native English-speaking authors. Herein, we describe the effects of a combined system of in-house and external editing services for handling large volumes of editing requests and providing personalized editing service in academic hospitals.MethodsWe established the Scientific Publications Team (SPT), an in-house editing team in Asan Medical Center in Seoul, Korea. The SPT is composed of two professional editors who manage editing requests sent to external companies while also providing one-on-one in-house editing services. We gathered author satisfaction data from 936 surveys between July 2017 and December 2018 and analyzed the number of editing requests and research publications by segmented regression analysis of interrupted time series data.ResultsThe SPT processed 3931 editing requests in 2017–2018, which was a marked increase compared with prior to its establishment (P = 0.0097). The authors were generally satisfied with the quality of editing services from both in-house and external editors. Upon conducting regular quality control, overall author satisfaction with one external company gradually increased over the course of one year (P for trend = 0.086). Author satisfaction survey results revealed that overall satisfaction of editing service was most strongly correlated with how well the edits conformed to the authors’ intentions (R = 0.796), and was only weakly correlated with quick turnaround time (R = 0.355). We also observed a significant increase in the trend of the number of research publications (P = 0.0007) at one year after the establishment of the SPT.ConclusionProviding a combination of in-house and external editing services resulted in high author satisfaction and subsequent hospital-wide increases in manuscript writing and publication. Our model system may be adapted in academic hospitals to better address the editing needs of non-native English-speaking researchers.
Highlights
Writing effective and persuasive research articles requires a wide range of communication skills such as language comprehension, data presentation, and establishment of logical flow, which poses difficulty even for native English-speaking researchers
Researchers at Asan Medical Center (AMC) may fill out the “English editing request form” available on the hospital intranet to request English editing for research-related documents, including drafts of original manuscripts, revised manuscripts and response letters to reviewer comments, conference abstracts, and scripts for oral presentations, the last of which were exclusively handled by the in-house editors (S1 Table)
In order to facilitate the editing process and improve author satisfaction, in-house editing teams should selectively distribute editing requests according to the specific needs of each request: external editing companies (EECs) may be better suited for handling requests for simple grammar checks or those that require quick turnaround time, while in-house editors may be more adept in handling more complex requests such as those requiring in-person consultations for content and organization of the manuscript
Summary
Writing effective and persuasive research articles requires a wide range of communication skills such as language comprehension, data presentation, and establishment of logical flow, which poses difficulty even for native English-speaking researchers. Non-native researchers naturally encounter more challenges when writing manuscripts in English, which are compounded by the increasing pressure to “publish-or-perish” in academia Such pressure is especially intense for physicians working in academic hospitals in Korea, where more emphasis tends to be placed on the quantity of research outputs rather than clinical hours for career advancement. Past generations of medical residents and fellows were able to receive informal tips-and-tools type education on manuscript writing from advisors within their respective departments. Such mentor-mentee relationships are dissipating due to increased clinical workloads for professors and fellows alike [1,2], leaving early-career researchers lacking in terms of proper training in manuscript writing. We describe the effects of a combined system of in-house and external editing services for handling large volumes of editing requests and providing personalized editing service in academic hospitals.
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