It seems that most jour­nals no longer do any seri­ous copy-​​editing, and the stan­dard of Eng­lish is falling. Today I was read­ing an arti­cle from the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Oper­a­tional Research, which is a sup­pos­edly a good OR jour­nal (cur­rent impact fac­tor over 2). Take this for an exam­ple from the first page of this paper:

If the learned pat­terns are unsta­ble, the learn­ing tools would pro­duce incon­sis­tent con­cepts. To over­come this dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, we employed arti­fi­cial neural net­works (ANNs, NNs) for help­ing the learn­ing task. NNs have attracted a lot of atten­tion form aca­d­e­mic researchers and indus­trial prac­ti­tion­ers because of the pow­er­ful flex­i­ble non­lin­ear mod­el­ing capa­bil­ity ([Balestrassi et al., 2009], [Bellini and Figa-​​Talamanca, 2005] and [Qi and Zhang, 2001]). It is the main rea­son for their pop­u­lar­ity that the data dri­ven tools have less restric­tion when applying. Learning tools with the sta­ble train­ing base usu­ally have reli­able performances.

The paper con­tin­ues in this vein for ten pages, cul­mi­nat­ing in an equally remark­able conclusion:

With the sam­ple size grow­ing, the shadow set con­tains a large num­ber of func­tional, vir­tual data, instead of whole real data. It would pos­sess less pop­u­la­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tion then. Before estab­lish­ing the the­o­ret­i­cal basis, we used the trial-​​and-​​error way for the expe­di­ent expla­na­tion and con­cluded that the vir­tual data size should be 10 at most in this case.

How did that get passed the asso­ciate edi­tor, edi­tor, copy-​​editor and type­set­ter? Did every­one really think it was ok, or did the paper get pub­lished with­out any of them actu­ally read­ing it prop­erly? It sounds like some­thing out of an auto­matic trans­la­tion pro­gram such as Google trans­late, although I sus­pect that Google trans­late may do rather better.

The des­per­ate rush to pub­lish as much and as often as pos­si­ble has led to a del­uge of badly expressed sen­tences, cob­bled together to look like an arti­cle, but often express­ing lit­tle of value.

Of course, one of the rea­sons for the rise of barely read­able Eng­lish is the increas­ing num­ber of papers writ­ten by researchers whose first lan­guage is not Eng­lish. I feel for them—I couldn’t write a sin­gle sen­tence in any other lan­guage. How­ever, there are ser­vices avail­able to help. In fact, in the sub­mis­sion guide­lines for Else­vier jour­nals, authors are advised to visit www​.else​vier​.com/​w​p​s​/​f​i​n​d​/​a​u​t​h​o​r​s​h​o​m​e​.​a​u​t​h​o​r​s​/​l​a​n​g​u​a​g​e​p​o​l​i​shing if they need assistance.

For authors who can’t afford to use such ser­vices, and even for authors whose Eng­lish is pass­able, jour­nals need copy-​​editors. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems the prob­lem is often the poor qual­ity of the work done by copy-​​editors employed by the jour­nal publishers.

One of the first things I did when I took over as Editor-​​in-​​Chief at the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Fore­cast­ing was replace the copy-​​editing team employed by Else­vier (the same group respon­si­ble for the above para­graphs) and install my own copy-​​editor who can at least rec­og­nize bad Eng­lish when she sees it. Fur­ther­more, I con­vinced Else­vier that they should pay for her. As a result, I think our pub­lished papers are now of a much higher qual­ity than they were a few years ago. Hope­fully that means they are read more, cited more and have greater impact. I wish other jour­nals would do the same.

Related Posts:

• Should you make your work­ing papers public?
• Writ­ing responses to ref­eree reports
• Join­ing an edi­to­r­ial board
• Author­ship ethics
• Your name is your brand