Tools For Foreign Authors

As researchers in China and elsewhere increasingly publish in English-language journals, a number of services are offering to help polish their manuscripts before submission.

Last year, Springer, a scientific publishing company, introduced a free, online linguistic tool called Exemplar that shows how a particular term or phrase is used in the publisherÍs peer-reviewed journals. After typing in a particular term to look up, the user can sort the results by categories such as subject area or journal title. Users who want to see the full text of an article from which the illustrative section was excerpted can view it by clicking on a hyperlink, but access to most articles requires a fee or a subscription.

Companies such as American Journal Experts offer English editing and proofreading services to journal manuscript authors at modest fees determined by paper length and turnaround time. For instance, a paper that is 1,500 to 6,000 words long would cost $209 to translate within 48 hours. An illustrative example of AJEÍs editing can be seen at journalexperts.com/en/editing-services#editing_sample. The company, which is based in Durham, N.C., also offers some translation services to authors who would prefer to write papers in their native languages.

The American Chemical Society has compiled a list of such companies along with questions that authors might want to ask before contracting for editing services. The list and questions can be viewed at pubs.acs.org/page/4authors/tools/language_editing.html.

Chemical & Engineering News

ISSN 0009-2347

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