How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

The copyediting and proofing processes
The publishing process (How to deal with proofs)—and after publication
Publishing the paper

If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.

—John Clare

The copyediting and proofing processes

The following is a brief description of the process that your manuscript follows after it has been accepted for publication.

The manuscript usually goes through a copyediting procedure, during which errors in spelling and grammar are corrected. In addition, the copyeditor will standardize all abbreviations, units of measure, punctuation, and spelling in accord with the style of the journal in which your manuscript is to be published. At some journals, copyeditors also revise writing to increase readability, such as by improving sentence structure and making wording more concise. Many English-language journals with sufficient staff to do so devote extra effort to copyediting papers by nonnative speakers of English in order to promote clear international communication. The copyeditor may direct questions to you if any of your wording is not clear or if any additional information is needed. These questions may appear as author queries written on or accompanying the proofs (typeset pages) sent to the author. Alternatively, the queries may appear on or with the copyedited manuscript if the journal sends it to the author for approval before preparing the proofs.

Typically, the edited version of the electronic file that you provided is loaded into a computer system that can communicate with a typesetting system, which will produce the proofs of your article. The copyeditor or compositor enters codes that indicate the typefaces and page layout of the various elements.

The output of this effort is your set of proofs, which is then returned to you so that you may check the editorial work that has been done on your article, look for typographical errors, and answer any further questions by the copyeditor. Commonly, you will receive the proofs of your article as a PDF file.

Finally, someone at the journal will enter the corrections that you make on your proofs. The final version will be what you see when your paper is published in the pages of the journal.