Language Editing for the European Journal of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery

Abstract

Introduction - The remit of the language editor for the EJVES is to ensure consistency, freedom from errors and readability of the content of both the EJVES and EJVES Short Reports. The quality of the submitted articles varies widely irrespective of both the country of origin and first language of the authors. From 1 February 2013, all documents from all countries have been subjected to language editing, and to date >1000 documents have been edited. Methods - For one year from 1 February 2017 detailed data on the country of origin, corrections per page, turnaround time, and common edits were collected. After acceptance for publication and copy editing, double line spaced copies of each article were sent to the language editor. The turnaround time was set at a maximum of 7 days to minimise publication delay. Results - 320 documents were edited with a turnaround time of 2.4 days (0-9 days). There were 14 categories of document of which 141 (44%) were Original Articles, 56 (17.5%) were Coup d'Oeil, 42 (13.1%) were Invited Commentaries, and 21 (6.5%) each were Reviews and Editorials. The articles were submitted from 38 countries (1-64 per country) with UK, France, Sweden, Netherlands and Italy accounting for 49%. A total of 4435 pages were edited, ranging from 1-160 pages per document. The editing time was 3:00 minutes per page (range 1:09-8:50) and was determined by the number of corrections required. For documents of more than 3 pages (n = 210, average number of pages 20, total pages 4230) the number of corrections ranged from 0.87-16.8 per page, with an average per country of 3.4 for the best and 15.3 for the worst. The commonest corrections included inappropriate hyphenation, incorrect word use, spelling, order of words, mixing US and UK spelling, omission of the definite and indefinite article and word spacing errors. Conclusion -All papers in the EJVES and EJVES Short Reports have been language edited for 5 years providing consistent, error free, readable content. The onerous job of the Senior Editor and Editor in Chief, who previously performed this task themselves, has been made significantly easier.