Joseph Mills: An Author’s Editor

Abstract

Joseph Mills is a senior editor in the Neuroscience Publications Department at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, where he lends his editorial expertise to assist authors with preparing manuscripts for journals, surgical textbooks, videos, and presentations. During a recent phone conversation, Mills shared his career path as a science editor, and we discussed matters about substantive editing for authors and publication ethics. After finishing graduate school for English, Mills started his first editorial job with Pfizer, where he copyedited internal laboratory reports and other scientific materials. This led him to his next opportunity editing medical journals for the University of Chicago Press. Following the closure of the medical journals department, he briefly worked supervising freelancers for American Journal Experts before returning to the press to work on scientific journals including American Naturalist, Current Anthropology, and others. Eventually relocating to Arizona, he was a freelance editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) network for a year before taking his current position at Barrow in 2018. There is visceral satisfaction that Mills finds in making something better—to contribute to the texts he edits by improving clarity that will in turn communicate important knowledge to the medical community and directly help patients. The instruments and devices, research findings, and surgical techniques being developed at Barrow are incredibly specialized and important, and while the surgeons are skillfully trained to execute precise procedures in complex areas of anatomy, they can be less experienced in expressing their ideas clearly or presenting […]