You can waste a considerable amount of time when reviewing and editing draft documents, particularly when it is being reviewed by an inexperienced team [1,2,3]. When you send a ‘raw’ text out to a team for review you can multiply the number of ours you expect to spend on a document by the number of people on the review team [2,4].
Your reviewers may also have their own writing style and poorly prepared documents (not ready for circulation) can result in heavy re-writes by the team [1,5]. This not only has the potential to waste their time but also your time navigating how best to combine additional text and possible tables/figures into the work returned by the other members of the review team [2,4,6].
I know I have my own exacting requirements when I review draft documents and also like to provide ‘training’ to the review team, explaining the choices you have made. Editorial guidance recognises that reviewers often use manuscript review as an opportunity to provide developmental feedback, particularly in collaborative or mentoring contexts [3,7]. It may seem somewhat nonsensical, but I may even add edits and comments to sections that I ask to be removed, a practice often observed in substantive peer and internal review processes [5,6]. There is such a potential for all parties to burn time [1,2]. There are few texts where I don’t provide comment of some form or another. In response, I have developed a structured approach that has served me well in providing timely reviews, consistent with recommendations from biomedical publishing authorities [2,3,8]. To be clear, I only use these techniques on documents Niche has been employed to deliver and which fit within clearly defined writing and editing services and appropriate ethical boundaries relating to contributions made to documents [9,10].
In order, the three steps include:
Research review: involves evaluating various aspects of the research including whether the literature of the field has been interpreted correctly, whether the methods used were appropriate, correct use of the methods (including any statistical analysis) and the results are clearly presented [11,12,13]. It is also important to cross reference the conclusions against the projects objectives, endpoints and whether the conclusions drawn from the results are robust [11,12].
Document structure: Addressing the flow of the document – effectively its storytelling. This tends to consider the larger structural aspects of a document. Interrogations includes:
- Whether any additional background information should be included [12,14].
- Background/Discussion content – is all the relevant information included, should or could sections be deleted [11,12]?
- Is the information/data presented in the best sequence for the reader to understand it [12,14]?
- Is the document the right length/does it meet any restrictions for the document type [11,15]?
Text editing: This includes phrasing, transitions between paragraphs, and grammar usage [1,8]. In addition, the process involves cross referencing links to tables, figures and appendices and finalising the references [11,15]. The order you address these different aspects can be down to personal preference. As you tend to be closer to document completion when you get to text editing, it can be useful to adopt a structured approach: structural components (tables and figures), punctuation and abbreviations and finally grammar [1,8,11].
This approach may not necessarily be considered as addressing the aspects of the document in order of their importance, rather they are addressed in order they are most likely to extend the review and finalisation process [2,4,6]. Clearly, all three aspects are critical to produce a high-quality document – but, rather, they are ordered according to how disruptive the changes at each phase would be to the other aspects of document development [11,12,13].
It can be difficult to coordinate larger editing teams when you are trying to adopt a considered, time efficient three-phase approach to editing [2,4]. It is far too easy to start line editing a manuscript and miss the larger fundamental problems with the research or the structure of the document [11,13]. Reviewers often get to the end of the document and find that they have made a lot of comments and conclude, “that’s enough changes for one round of editing,” and fail to address these other, larger issues [13,16]. For that reason, it can sometimes be best to identify a smaller review group who can perform a first research review edit. Only distributing to the wider team once all the kinks have been ironed out [3,4,11].
Authors are not always aware of the true status of their documents. Studies of peer review and editorial assessment indicate that external review is often required to accurately determine manuscript readiness and quality [3,13,16]. In addition to saving time and effort, the three-phase process helps authors focus on higher-order issues rather than becoming lost in line-editing corrections and expecting a manuscript to move from first draft to final version in a single revision cycle [11,15].
