Copy Editors Can Play a Role in the Detection and Elimination of “Tortured Phrases”

Copy editors possess a very specific skill set, including linguistic fluidity. In scholarly communication, the work by copy editors translates into text in papers that is scientifically accurate,1 which can increase the chance of acceptance following peer review.2 Five professional features of copy editors that contribute to the accuracy of scientific communication are “clarity, coherency, consistency, conciseness, comprehensibility, and correctness.”3(p4) These elements improve a paper’s style and readability after peer review and prior to proof development and publication.4,5 In academic publishing, copy editors are also required to verify the accuracy of references.6 When the accuracy of jargon to describe scientific findings is absent, the text’s scientific message becomes ambiguous or misleading.7 Copy editors, either in-house or externally contracted, contribute to the accuracy of a journal’s content, usually at the last step of each manuscript’s processing. In an attempt to trim costs and maximize profits, however, some journals or publishers might cut copy editors from the quality control workflow.3 Yet, this decision comes at a risk, namely that erroneous or ambiguous text introduced by authors into their papers may be undetected by peer reviewers and editors, and thus end up in published papers. Although—to the author’s knowledge—there are no economic analyses that have assessed the costs associated with “cleaning up” erroneous literature at the postpublication stage, relative to the employment costs that were saved by removing the copy editor, the current volume of retractions, especially those related to poor quality control,8 suggests that scientific and linguistic errors could have been avoided, […]