Reading proofs

After your article has been accepted and edited, you will be sent a final version before publication, called a “proof.”

Act fast.

The editor will inform you that it is very important for you to reply quickly after examining the proof. Often a 48 hour time limit is suggested. It is too late to make major changes in the article without causing delays and added production costs. This means that if you decide you absolutely must change more than just an occasional spelling error, you may be charged money by the publication to do so. Since this is your last chance to correct anything in your article, take advantage of it. See if any spelling mistakes remain, or if any diagrams and captions are incorrect. One of the biggest challenges is catching mistakes that may have been introduced during the editing process. Editors are only human, so when they change something you wrote to make it better, they sometimes introduce mistakes of their own. It is up to you to catch these.

Since you wrote the article, there may be some new publications in your field which you may wish to add to your bibliography. Also check the spellings of the names of ajarns you cite in the paper. Sometimes a paper which you referred to as in press or awaiting publication has already appeared by the time your article does, so this is another useful update which you can add to your paper. Also be sure that any university affiliations you mention are likewise up to date.

How closely should you compare what you submitted to the final edited version?

There are time-consuming scientific ways to compare the original article you wrote with what editors have done to it. Adobe Acrobat offers a PDF file compare tool. There is also a free program, DiffPDF, which performs a similar function. These programs tell you exactly what changed in your article when the final version was prepared for publication. Some scholars try to duplicate this kind of close comparison by putting the two versions side by side and going through them. For the most part, the time and effort involved in such detailed comparisons are probably not worth it. You might take the opportunity to read your edited article the way almost all of your readers will see it, as if you were seeing it for the first time. Some journals advise you to read the proofs at least twice, but it is up to you to decide how many times you must read it to feel sure that it is flawless.

What to avoid.

If you suddenly feel that you could have expressed an idea in English in a better way, it is too late for that kind of change by the time your article is in proof. Don’t even bother to mention this kind of change, as your editor will not appreciate it. Questions of writing style are decided during the writing and revising stages of your paper, not after it has already been accepted somewhere. You will rarely if ever see corrected proofs, so there is no point in expecting them. The proofs you have been sent are your one and only chance for any fixes before publication. Keep it down to 25-30 suggested corrections maximum. If you need to make several corrections of the same kind, such as the spelling of a name or a formula, that should count as a single correction. Typographical mistakes and misstatements of fact are what editors want to learn about. They do not want to see new ideas at this stage of the article, nor do they wish you to take out material that was in the article. They are mainly interested in avoiding adding further mistakes in your research.

Online Proofing System (OPS)

While many publications will sent you a proof in the form of a pdf file, others use an Online Proofing System (OPS). This requires some extra reading to understand how the OPS works with whatever browser you are using. It may be tedious to read all the instructions, but if you intend to have a long and happy academic career and produce lots of wonderful articles, then you will probably have an opportunity to use your knowledge of the OPS again before too long.

What else to send back and what to expect.

Editors will be grateful if you send back a proof promptly. They may also send you a copyright agreement and a form in which you request a number of offprints of the article. Both of these items should be returned quickly as well. After receiving your suggested changes, it is up to the editor to decide whether or not to incorporate all or any of them into the paper. Naturally, the publication wants to be as accurate as possible, and it also wants authors to be happy, so they will try to please you. If they cannot, for whatever reason, try to be understanding. They have lots of authors and articles to deal with and cannot always please everybody. If you have further questions, send an email to the journal’s production editor, who should be able to tell you what changes would be acceptable at this point.

Be patient.

Even after proofs have been returned, there may be what seems like a long wait until the publication finally appears. That is the nature of academic publishing, where things are done years in advance. Don’t hold your breath, and when the article is finally published, it will be pleasant news.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).