editing process

Mistakes Were Made

Posted by

0

The January-March 2011 issue of Science Editor is devoted to the theme of correcting the scientific literature, something that happens to our journals on a regular basis. In 2011 alone, we’ve already logged more than 70 corrections. With the advent of rushing to get everything online as soon as possible, sometimes it seems like we are doing more corrections than ever. Or maybe it just feels that way because with online articles, we can go in and fix that darn typo rather than just let it be. Hard to say.

You can check out the post about it at the Science Editor Editor’s Blog, and (if you are a Council of Science Editors member) read the whole thing at the CSE site. Also, feel free to leave a comment and let us know how your publication handles corrections in print and online.—Lauren Fischer

Who Was That Masked Manual?

Posted by

0

No one wants to be a don’t, a fashion faux pas splashed in full color across the page of a widely circulated fashion magazine. In an attempt to protect the identity of the don’t, one such periodical places black bars over the eyes of each fashion offender. Is this technique sufficient to spare the person the potential humiliation and ridicule that may follow? The AMA Manual of Style offers a resounding no.

Reports of medical cases and research can be greatly enhanced by a photographic or illustrative example of the condition under discussion. Imagine reading a case report of a unique rash with no accompanying photograph, or an article about a newly developed surgical technique without before-and-after images or an illustration of the surgeon’s approach. A picture, it is often said, is worth a thousand words (see 7.5.4, Clichés).

Medical journals have a responsibility to protect patients’ rights to privacy and anonymity, including the deletion of patients’ names, initials, and assigned numbers from case reports; the removal of identifying information from radiographs, digital images, and laboratory slides; and the deletion of identifying details from descriptions of patients or study participants in published articles (see 5.8.2, Patients’ Rights to Privacy and Anonymity).

Until the late 1980s, placing black bars over the eyes of patients in photographs was accepted as a way to protect their identities. However, some journals began to discontinue this practice when it became apparent that bars across the eyes do not preserve confidentiality (see 5.8.2, Patients’ Rights to Privacy and Anonymity). The Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals concurs, noting that “masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity.”1

When detailed descriptions, photographs, or videos of faces or identifiable body parts are included with a manuscript that might permit any patient to be identified (even if only by the patient himself or herself), authors should obtain written permission from the identifiable patients (or legally authorized representatives) to publish the information. An example of the patient permission form used by JAMA and the Archives Journals is available at http://pubs.ama-assn.org/misc/patientconsent.pdf. The journal may wish to state (eg, in the Acknowledgment) that the patient shown and/or described has provided written permission.

If such permission cannot be obtained, another approach the journal might take is to remove nonessential potentially identifying details. For example, a patient described as a “20-year-old woman from suburban St Louis with end-stage renal disease undergoing dialysis” could be rewritten as a “young adult woman with end-stage renal disease undergoing dialysis.”

However, altering descriptive characteristics (eg, sex) is not appropriate because it is a form of falsification and may be misunderstood by readers and others conducting secondary analyses of published reports. The best way to provide complete information while protecting patient rights is to obtain informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that an identifiable patient be shown the manuscript to be published or waive his/her right to review the paper.1

To protect patients and to spare potential legal woes, medical journals should not use black bars on photographs in the attempt to preserve confidentiality. The image should be replaced with one that has permission for publication or one in which identifiability is not an issue, or the article should run sans photograph.—Stacy L. Christiansen, MA

1. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: ethical considerations in the conduct and reporting of research: privacy and confidentiality—patients and study participants. http://www.icmje.org/ethical_5privacy.html. Accessed May 9, 2011.

Quiz Bowl: Units of Measure

Posted by

0

Welcome, participants, to the AMA Manual of Style Quiz Bowl. Every month at http://www.amamanualofstyle.com/, we offer subscribers a quiz on different aspects of the manual that help participants master AMA style and improve their editing skills. Previous quizzes have covered topics as varied as correct and preferred usage, genetics, tables, figures, and ethics, as well as numerous other subjects. In this blog, we will offer a sample question from each month’s quiz to whet your appetite. This month’s quiz is on Units of Measure: Format, Style, and Punctuation. So, here goes.

Edit the following sentence based on your understanding of section 18.3 of the AMA Manual of Style.

A total of 50 mg of etanercept were administered subcutaneously twice weekly for 12 weeks.

Well, how did you do? Did you identify the problem? Here’s the answer (use your mouse to highlight the text box):

A total of 50 mg of etanercept was administered subcutaneously twice weekly for 12 weeks.

Units of measure are treated as collective singular (not plural) nouns and require a singular verb (§18.3.3, Subject-Verb Agreement, p 791 in print).

So, did you enjoy this tidbit? If you are not sated, subscribe to the AMA Manual of Style online and take the full quiz.—Laura King, MA, ELS

Are You Nauseous or Nauseated?

Posted by

0

Writers and editors rushing to meet deadlines know the feeling. The effects of stress, a few too many cups of coffee, and perhaps a candy bar or bag of chips in place of a meal can conspire to make the most steely-nerved wordsmith feel a tad nauseated. Or is it nauseous? And what of that stress, that coffee, that ill-chosen meal replacement—are its effects nauseating or nauseous?

Grammarians with more prescriptive leanings (ie, those concerned with language as it “should” be used, which presumably would include most writers and editors) would say that a person feels nauseated and that which has made him or her feel that way is nauseous. Those with more descriptive leanings (those concerned with language as it is actually used, which includes professional linguists as well as armchair observers of language) are eager to point out that while nauseated is still more often used to mean feeling the effects of nausea, the use of nauseous in that subjective sense is rapidly gaining acceptance. Similarly, while nauseous is still more often used to mean causing nausea, the use of nauseating in that causative sense will soon be more prevalent, if it is not already. Debates on the merits of prescriptive vs descriptive use of these terms can be quite heated, and current dictionaries and usage guides often attempt to walk a line between the two camps—which, considering the potential for rancor, is probably not a bad idea, particularly taking into account the ever-evolving nature of language as well as the history of these terms.

So first, a little history. Despite the pronouncements of some prescriptive grammarians promoting the idea that nauseous, when used to mean “feeling the effects of nausea,” is yet another example of a weed newly sprung up in the garden of educated usage, it appears that the term was used in that sense as early as 1604. What is more, it was likely not used to mean “causing nausea” until 1612 or later. At some point, the rule was set forth dictating that nauseous should be used to indicate causing nausea and nauseated to indicate the subjective feeling of nausea—a rule that for the most part held sway until the mid-20th century, when nauseous once again began to be used by persons describing how they feel.

Nauseous, then, when used to describe the feeling of nausea, is something of a grammatical atavism, a throwback to an earlier usage that seems to have fallen into disfavor in the intervening centuries. The term has regained its original meaning in a few generations, a resurrection only accelerated by today’s fast-paced media mix. For example, when comedian Mike Myers’ Saturday Night Live character, Linda Richman, claimed that something “makes me nauseous” (always pronounced as two syllables, with the slightest of pauses when pronouncing the first: “naaw′ shus”), the use of the term in that sense gathered steam in short order, gaining an ever-widening circulation as viewers of the program used it in conversation and e-mails; it likely now lives a healthy and happy life in the various social networking media. Other related terms from the 17th century—nauseation, nauseative, nauseity, nausity—are now obsolete or used very rarely, but for now nauseous as used to describe the subjective state of nausea seems here to stay.

So how does all of this pan out for the person seeking guidance on the use of nauseous, nauseated, and nauseating? As is often the case, an answer—very seldom is there such a thing as the answer—lies in the ever-shifting borders between the spoken and the written word. Whereas the use of nauseous in the subjective sense when speaking now seems a given, nauseated is still holding its own in text. Conversely, the use of nauseous to indicate the cause of nausea is rapidly falling into disuse in spoken conversation (and when it is used, it is sometimes confused with noxious), whereas it maintains only a rapidly diminishing tenuous lead over nauseating in text.

Accordingly, JAMA and the Archives Journals very seldom use nauseous in the causative sense and not at all in the subjective sense (unless part of quoted material); nauseating is used for the former and nauseated for the latter, at least until the dust has settled on another generation or two of language evolution. In the meantime, writers and editors rushing to meet deadlines are encouraged to take steps to eliminate or reduce stress, consume coffee in moderation, and make prudent dietary choices if skipping meals. — Phil Sefton, ELS

Duplicity, or the Dangers of Duplicate e-Publication

Posted by

3

The senior author of a paper has posted its entire contents, including additional data that do not appear in the version sent to your publication, on his academic department’s Web site. The author did not mention this online version to the journal editors. He has already signed the publisher’s copyright transfer form. Is this a problem? How do you proceed?

The Internet has opened many new doors for the dissemination of scientific information, but it has also created new dilemmas. Just because it’s easy to post or send information to more than one place does not mean that this practice is acceptable.

As noted in the AMA Manual of Style, duplicate publication is the simultaneous or subsequent reporting of essentially the same information, article, or major components of an article 2 or more times in 1 or more forms of media (either print or electronic format) (see 5.3, Duplicate Publication).1(p148)

JAMA’s Instructions for Authors notes that submissions are considered with the understanding that they have not been published previously in print or electronic format and are not under consideration by another publication or electronic medium.2 Copies of related or possibly duplicative materials (ie, those containing substantially similar content or using the same or similar data) that have been previously published or are under consideration elsewhere must be provided at the time of manuscript submission.

According to the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), publication of complete manuscripts in proceedings of meetings in print or online may preclude consideration for publication in a primary-source journal.3

Thus, the answer to the first question above is yes, this is a problem. Duplicate submission/publication is an offense to the author–journal relationship and an affront to the ethical reporting of biomedical research. In addition, if the author has transferred copyright or a license to publish the manuscript to the journal, he/she also could violate copyright law. The type of Web site that has posted the article is not relevant; whether it’s another journal, an institutional site, or even a blog, online posting is publication.

To resolve the situation, it is important to know where in the publication process that manuscript is and to have a frank conversation with the corresponding author. One of the simplest options is for the journal to insist on the immediate removal of the content on the academic department’s Web site. Another approach is for the journal to reject the paper on the basis of previous publication, provided it has not published the manuscript already. In the worst-case scenario, the author refuses to take the paper off the Web site and the journal has already published it as well. This could lead to a notice of duplicate publication, consultation with the senior author’s institutional supervisor, and/or banning the author from publishing in that journal for a specified time.

After publication, some journals permit authors to post a copy of the published article (eg, a PDF) on their academic department or institutional Web site or establish toll-free links from these Web sites to the author’s article on the journal’s Web site. This is an acceptable form of secondary publication (see 5.3.1, Secondary Publication).

Extensive discussion of various examples and consequences of duplicate submission/publication appear in the AMA Manual of Style1 and the ICMJE guidelines.3 The new wrinkle is the ease (and speed) with which researchers can post information online. It may be easy to forget that the Internet, while seemingly ethereal, is a publication venue all the same.—Stacy L. Christiansen, MA

1. Iverson C, Christiansen S, Flanagin A, et al. The AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors. 10th ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2007.

2. JAMA Instructions for Authors: Duplicate/Previous Publication or Submission. http://jama.ama-assn.org/site/misc/ifora.xhtml#DuplicatePreviousPublicationorSubmission. Updated March 15, 2011. Accessed April 13, 2011.

3. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Publishing and Editorial Issues Related to Publication in Biomedical Journals—Overlapping Publications. ICMJE Web site. http://www.icmje.org/publishing_4overlap.html. Updated 2009. Accessed April 13, 2011.

What Are You Trying to Say?

Posted by

0

In his chapter, “An Approach to Style” in The Elements of Style, E. B. White states, “A careful and honest writer does not have to worry about style.” This statement guides me as an editor, and as a writer, when I become too mired in the frustrations of dangling modifiers, passive sentences, imperfect words. I try to remember, the point of any writing is to communicate. When I ask myself what I am communicating, and get back to the simplest idea of my purpose for an assignment, the editing becomes easier, and the intricacies of style seem less of an obstacle and more of a tool.

But what happens when an editor isn’t sure what he or she is communicating? Medicine is complex, full of specialized words and obscure concepts. What happens when we don’t realize that a word is being used incorrectly, because our understanding of the concept being communicated is limited? This is perhaps the most difficult challenge I face as an editor of medical journals, and the reason we track our changes when sending them to authors. What if my streamlining of a complex sentence detrimentally affects its meaning? It’s always my fear that, in attempting to improve a statement, I will cause the meaning to be changed.

This is why I’m grateful for the author-assisted editing process. Each author who carefully sorts through my myriad comments and questions, who assesses the edits I make and comments on them, is my ally in making sure any reader, regardless of their experience with English or level of medical expertise, can use our journals in their work. Physicians are busy people, and editing is not their job. Yet, this partnership allows us to make our journal as useful and far-reaching as possible. As a microbiology student, I regularly used medical journals in my research and school assignments. Reading these studies was challenging at best, and occasionally baffling. It’s this experience that I go back to—remembering that it’s not just myself and the author who will need to understand this work, that it affects all levels of medicine—and remembering my purpose, I turn the elements of style into my tools.—Roya Khatiblou, MA