How To Revise Your Scholarly Paper Efficiently and Effectively
You have to revise the paper you submitted to an academic or scientific journal and you have to do it quickly amidst an incredibly busy term of teaching, research and administrative duties. You recognise that the editor’s request for revisions is a positive response to your writing and you certainly want to meet the deadline he or she indicated in order to be published in the next issue. The deadline is less than two weeks away, however, and it is going to be an enormous challenge to find enough time not only to make changes, but also to reflect on the comments you have received and make wise decisions to accommodate the editor’s requests and improve your paper from your own perspective as well. You need a strategy – one that will achieve maximum effect in a minimum amount of time – and you need it now, so the one I outline here may prove helpful.
Start with the largest issues. Yes, this may be exactly what you do not want to do because it always seems easier to begin with small details and gradually work into larger and more significant changes, but there is no time for gradual. There is also no time for doing more than is necessary, and one of the consequences of polishing details before you tackle major changes is that work on those details often needs repeating or adjusting due to the larger revisions. If, for instance, you have been asked to alter the content of your paper in significant ways or completely restructure your article to meet journal guidelines, it will be best to make these large-scale changes first. Such revisions are likely to take a considerable amount of thought as well as time, and they are also the sort of changes that you should devise and implement yourself as they can usually be done most efficiently and effectively only by a person who knows the research and the paper very well indeed.
Once you have made the major revisions that involve shifting and changing content and redesigning and reshaping structure, you can move onto smaller matters, and for at least some of these you will be able to solicit help. If the editor has pointed out that there seems to be some inconsistency in the data you have provided in the main text and the tables, you will be the person best equipped to examine and correct numbers and details quickly and accurately, but if it is simply a matter of the format of numbers being inconsistent, an accomplished graduate student eager for a little extra cash or a professional academic or scientific proofreader will be able to help you make the necessary changes. Similarly, if you have discovered that your references are incomplete and in the wrong style for the journal, you will probably need to review them and provide any missing information that would be difficult for others to obtain, but that graduate student could make the time-consuming changes required to produce the right style, and a professional proofreader can check the work to ensure that guidelines are followed with precision and consistency.
Engaging the services of a highly qualified professional who is well suited to polishing the details that many academics and scientists find tedious will significantly increase your efficiency and the quality of the revised product. Whether you choose to seek help or do it all yourself, however, it is always wise to have a colleague or mentor who is able to dedicate a little time to your work immediately read your paper once the initial revisions have been completed. While he or she is reading, you will have time to reflect on the changes already made and therefore be more prepared to do any final revisions that your colleague or mentor may suggest.
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At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, phd thesis editing and proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our expert editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.
Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to PhD proofreading and master’s proofreading, offering research students the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and dissertation proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.
If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.
