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IS QUALITY CONTROL POSSIBLE IN THE FIELD OF SCIENTIFIC EDITING?

The short answer is no, in most cases. Several factors ensure good quality of editing and are not always implemented or addressed at editing companies:

• If a language certificate is issued, this should be done immediately before submission to a journal, so that the editing company knows what is being submitted to the journal. Otherwise, the authors will make post-edit changes or reject many corrections, and the certificate will be meaningless and will damage the editing company's reputation. An editing company must be able to issue a language certificate within several hours of a client's request, after a quick second language check, and free of charge if there are not many differences between the two versions of the manuscript (the edited manuscript delivered to the client versus the manuscript being submitted to a journal).
• Through comments and questions, this quick second language check resolves many errors and misunderstandings. Therefore, an optimal quality control team consists of the editor and the author(s).
• The editor should have good subject area expertise. The editor who has worked on your previous manuscripts many times before is preferable. Ideally, you need to find an experienced and reliable editor who understands your field of research and with whom you will be collaborating for a long time. At large editing companies, clients usually do not know the name or the level of experience of a freelance editor, who is allocated randomly unless you request an editor who worked on such-and-such assignment.
• Ideally, you need a bilingual editor who knows your native language, because in this case, the quality of editing will be much better, all else being equal. The reason is that English-as-a-second-language authors sometimes translate sentences or phrases literally from their mother tongue, and this literal translation will be a puzzle for an editor who doesn't know the native language of the author. Alternatively, the sentence will be easy to understand but the meaning is incorrect, and the editor does not see this problem.
• The editor must be in an excellent state of health; otherwise, he/she will introduce many errors oneself.
• The editor must have good self-control and be able to prevent procrastination. Procrastination shortens the time available for editing thereby reducing the quality of editing.
• Suppose a client (author), journal, or peer reviewer makes negative comments about English in a manuscript that has been corrected by an editing company, and the client presents this complaint to the editing company. In this case, the quality control department usually does not consider possible causes of the language complaint that are not related to editing (listed here) and instead assigns a reviewer for re-editing. This approach can create language problems where there are none, as explained below.

On the other hand, the following approaches worsen the quality of editing and are often used by editing companies:

• Adding reviewers of unknown subject area expertise and uncertain health status to the editing process. These people will correct one or two errors overlooked by the primary editor, but they will most likely introduce more errors than they will correct. This approach can be useful if the primary editor has poor self-control and does a sloppy job because of procrastination. In most cases, adding reviewers is pointless because the authors will make additions to the manuscript and reject some corrections, thus returning or adding 5–10 errors to the text.
• A rigid deadline. It is not necessary in most cases, but large companies always set rigid deadlines for freelance editors. Any number of unforeseen circumstances can delay a freelancer, resulting in insufficient time for editing and poor quality of editing if there is a rigid deadline.
• Some editing companies now pre-edit manuscripts using special software before sending them off to freelancers for editing. This software corrects many grammatical errors but unfortunately introduces several meaning changes and other errors. Overall, this kind of software is currently too dumb for research manuscripts and corrupts such texts, thereby increasing, not reducing, the editing work for freelancers. You need to opt out of this pre-editing when you submit your manuscript to an editing company.
• Machine translations and manuscripts at the beginner level of English are accepted for editing. Unfortunately, editing cannot correct all problems in such manuscripts, as explained here. To be precise, many editing companies state in their instructions for clients that machine translations will not be accepted for editing, but if you submit such an order, it won't be rejected, and the company will take your money. The reason is that a large editing company is very concerned about revenues and is unable to tell a client an unpleasant truth. The freelancer who is working on a text that is unsuitable for editing will not stop working on the assignment after he/she accepted it and will not tell the editing company that this order should be rejected, for fear that the editing company will fire him on the spot. The freelancer will finish the editing however he can and will report the low quality of English (in the original text) to the editing company. The editing company will deliver the edited manuscript to the client and will not inform the client that this text is unsuitable for editing (for fear of losing the client), knowing full well that the manuscript still contains unclear sentences and that the meaning of many sentences is incorrect or distorted.
• Accepting an excessive number of orders that an editing company cannot handle. Sadly, large editing companies do not refuse any orders (with rare exceptions) and as a consequence deal with huge overloads several times a year, resulting in poor editing quality.
• In addition to editing, formatting of a manuscript according to a journal's instructions is often offered as a service. Scientific editing alone is difficult work often leading to procrastination. Naturally, the time spent by a freelancer on formatting shortens the time available for editing. If you want the best quality of editing, then you need to opt out of formatting.
• What will happen if you show a perfect manuscript (good logic and no problems with English) to an editing company and tell it that a competing editing company corrected this manuscript, but a journal requested "improvement of English"? Do you think the editing company will say "This is an excellent text, there is nothing to correct here"? Of course not! Because of either self-interest or insufficient subject area expertise of the freelance editor that will be assigned, the editing company in most cases will "find numerous errors" in this perfect manuscript. The same will happen if you show a perfect manuscript to a quality control department and tell it that one of the company's freelancers corrected this manuscript, but a journal found problems with English.
• The most egregious problems with the quality of editing are seen when authors are forced or "guided" by a scientific journal to hire the editing service provided by the publishing house of this journal. There are massive conflicts of interest in this situation. For example, these in-house editors know that the authors will not complain to the journal about the quality of editing, namely that the authors do not want to rock the boat and risk rejection of the manuscript. Accordingly, the appointed in-house editor will usually perform sloppy hasty editing, not even trying to understand what the manuscript is about, thus introducing numerous meaning changes and new errors. The journal will accept this butchered manuscript for publication without blinking an eye.