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

Misspelled words
The publishing process (How to deal with proofs)—and after publication
Publishing the paper

Even if an error does not greatly affect comprehension, it won’t do your reputation much good if it turns out to be funny. Readers will know what you mean if your paper refers to a “nosocomical infection,” and they will get a laugh out of it, but you won’t think it is funny.

A major laboratory-supply corporation submitted an ad with a huge, boldface headline: “Quality is consistant because we care.” We certainly hope that they cared more about the quality of their products than about the quality of their spelling.

Although all of us in publishing occasionally lose sleep worrying about typographical errors, we can take comfort in the realization that whatever slips past our eye is probably less grievous than some of the monumental errors committed by our publishing predecessors.

The best way to read proofs is first, read them, and second, study them. Reading will miss 90 percent of the errors, but it will catch errors of omission. If the printer has dropped a line, reading for comprehension is the only likely way to catch it. Alternatively, or additionally, it can be helpful for two people to read the proofs, one reading aloud while the other follows the manuscript.

To catch most errors, however, you must slowly examine each word. If you let your eye jump from one group of words to the next, as it does in normal reading, you will not catch very many misspellings. In particular, you should study the technical terms. A good keyboarder might be able to type the word cherry 100 times without error; however, there was a proof in which the word Escherichia was misspelled 21 consecutive times (in four different ways). One might also wonder about the possible uses for a chemical whose formula was printed as C12H6Q3. One way to look at each word without distraction is to read the proof backward, from last word to first.

As a safeguard, consider having someone else review the proofs in addition to doing so yourself. But do not delegate the proofreading solely to others, lest you suffer the plight of a colleague of ours who, tired of the publication process, had an office worker review the proofs. Only after the journal was published did the colleague find that the article title contained a misspelling.

We mentioned the havoc that could occur from a misplaced decimal point. This observation leads to a general rule in proofreading. Examine each and every number carefully. Be especially careful when proofing the tables. This rule is important for two reasons. First, errors frequently occur when typing numbers, especially in tabular material. Second, you are the only person who can catch such errors. Most spelling errors are caught in the printer’s proof room or in the journal’s editorial office. However, professional proofreaders catch errors by “eyeballing” the proofs. The proofreader has no way of knowing that “16” should be “61.”