I've read various articles and postings by journal article authors that complain about the process of copyediting and how it seems so unnecessary ... why, the CE only adds and deletes minor punctuation and asks for page numbers in references that no one has time to check and switches words around that make no difference anyway. I agree that some CEs have a heavy hand and may change things for the sake of changing things, but I know that most of my colleagues apply style in an exacting manner, adjust grammar errors correctly, and give a light touch to make a better article.
What scares me is how many things are probably wrong in an article that the CE cannot possibly catch unless he or she were to look up every little thing, which is impossible given schedules and wages. For example, today I am editing an article to appear a psychology journal. In cross-checking citations and references, I saw that a name in a citation was not spelled the same way as the name listed in the corresponding reference (a journal article), so I looked up this article on the Internet, finding the article listed in the TOC of its online journal, to find out the correct spelling of the author name. I discover that the author I am looking for did not write this article. In fact, there are eight names attributed to the article, and that misspelled author is not one of them.
I found this error by chance. There could be ten or more references in each journal article I edit that are incorrect in some major way, but unless I stumble upon them, I would not know.
In their article "Accuracy of References in Five Biomedical Informatics Journals," Dominik Aronsky, Joel Ransom, and Kevin Robinson looked at five journal issues, which contained 37 articles. "Among the 656 eligible references, 225 (34.3%) included at least one error. Among the 225 references, 311 errors were identified. One or more errors were found in the bibliography of 31 (84%) of the 37 articles. The reference error rates by journal ranged from 22.1% to 40.7%. Most errors (39.0%) occurred in the author element, followed by the journal (31.2%), title (17.7%), page (7.4%), year (3.5%), and volume (1.3%) information." In discussing these errors, they went on to say, "The names of authors are not only critical for retrieving articles but are also relevant when author citations are used to measure research productivity. ... Misspellings and variations in an author's name may prevent the program from retrieving all relevant citations and influence bibliometric measures and information retrieval approaches."
There are other studies of this as well, and I am sure they all come to similar conclusions. I would think that if the authors who complain about CEs asking for reference and citation corrections reflect on how their own piece may one day be attributed to their colleagues in error, the authors will feel better about answering those queries.
What scares me is how many things are probably wrong in an article that the CE cannot possibly catch unless he or she were to look up every little thing, which is impossible given schedules and wages. For example, today I am editing an article to appear a psychology journal. In cross-checking citations and references, I saw that a name in a citation was not spelled the same way as the name listed in the corresponding reference (a journal article), so I looked up this article on the Internet, finding the article listed in the TOC of its online journal, to find out the correct spelling of the author name. I discover that the author I am looking for did not write this article. In fact, there are eight names attributed to the article, and that misspelled author is not one of them.
I found this error by chance. There could be ten or more references in each journal article I edit that are incorrect in some major way, but unless I stumble upon them, I would not know.
In their article "Accuracy of References in Five Biomedical Informatics Journals," Dominik Aronsky, Joel Ransom, and Kevin Robinson looked at five journal issues, which contained 37 articles. "Among the 656 eligible references, 225 (34.3%) included at least one error. Among the 225 references, 311 errors were identified. One or more errors were found in the bibliography of 31 (84%) of the 37 articles. The reference error rates by journal ranged from 22.1% to 40.7%. Most errors (39.0%) occurred in the author element, followed by the journal (31.2%), title (17.7%), page (7.4%), year (3.5%), and volume (1.3%) information." In discussing these errors, they went on to say, "The names of authors are not only critical for retrieving articles but are also relevant when author citations are used to measure research productivity. ... Misspellings and variations in an author's name may prevent the program from retrieving all relevant citations and influence bibliometric measures and information retrieval approaches."
There are other studies of this as well, and I am sure they all come to similar conclusions. I would think that if the authors who complain about CEs asking for reference and citation corrections reflect on how their own piece may one day be attributed to their colleagues in error, the authors will feel better about answering those queries.
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