KOK Edit: consulting medical editor
KOK Edit: your_new.php KOK Edit: consulting medical editor Katharine O'Moore Klopf
services

English-Language Editing

Helping multilingual authors polish their articles for submission to US and UK medical journals is my specialty. I have edited manuscripts for authors from the following locations, in addition to the United States: Brazil, Czechoslovakia, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, and Turkey.


What I Do During Editing

When I edit journal manuscripts for authors like you who are multilingual authors, I am doing these tasks:

Even if I make a lot of changes to your writing, that does not mean that your writing is of poor quality. Native English speakers need editing assistance too. That is because excellent research skills and excellent writing skills seldom occur in the same person, regardless of the person's native language. I am your advocate in the publishing process. By doing a thorough edit, I am doing my best to help you communicate your research to your English-speaking peers worldwide.


Requirements for Working with Me

Thank you for your efforts on my article. I believe you are a responsible editor. I'm looking forward to our next cooperation.
—Weidong Xu, MD, Department of Orthopedics, Changhai Hospital, Second Military Medical University

Hiring me to edit your manuscript does not guarantee that your target journal will accept it for publication. But my editing does help your writing to be more polished, which may increase the likelihood that it will be considered for peer review.

Journal editors base their decision about whether to publish an article on several things: the quality of the research, how well that research is documented and described, how important they believe the research to be, and whether such research has already been described in their journal or elsewhere. I cannot fix those things by editing your writing.

Also, because I am a medical editor rather than a medical writer, I will not write any new material for you. However, I will edit your writing to make it flow smoothly and follow the conventions of your target journal.

If I edit your manuscript and then you make more changes to it that you do not allow me to review, the journal's editor-in-chief may think that you did not have your manuscript edited by an English-language editor. I am not responsible for such an outcome. It is your responsibility to give me a chance to review all changes that you make to the manuscript before submission.

Until I receive full payment for editing your manuscript, I retain copyright ownership of the work that I have done on the manuscript. This means that no journal can legally publish your article if you have not paid me for my editing. When I receive full payment from you, I no longer have any copyright claims on your article.

Journals require complete transparency about authorship and about editorial assistance. Therefore, I require that in the Acknowledgments section of your manuscript, you include the following sentence: Medical editor Katharine O'Moore-Klopf, ELS (East Setauket, NY, USA) provided professional English-language editing of this article.

For more information about how I assist authors, please see the Fees and Terms of Service page of this website.


The Editing Process

Usually, the whole process of editing and reviewing takes about 1 week, if the author and I are not interrupted by work emergencies.

Thank you for editing our manuscript. It was greatly improved. ... I totally agree to your kind corrections.
—Tomoyuki Matsumoto, MD, PhD, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery,Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine

For each manuscript, I perform two edits. The first edit takes the longest. My pace for editing manuscripts written by multilingual authors is approximately 2 pages per hour, where 1 page = 250 words. (In the US publishing industry, the document word count is used instead of Microsoft Word's physical page numbering to determine the number of pages in a manuscript.)

Please note that the Track Changes function in Microsoft Word will be turned on in your edited manuscript file to make it easy for me to tell which are your edits and comments and which are my edits and comments. You will not be able to use the Accept/Reject Changes function. This is to ensure that I can easily find your changes or comments to review them. If you do not agree with a particular edit, you can delete it, and your deletion will be tracked by Word. If text must be added, you can insert it, and your insertion will also be tracked by Word.

Do not copy the entire text of the edited file and then paste it into a new document. If you do any of the following 3 things, I will charge you an additional US$400:

After I complete the first edit, I will e-mail the manuscript to you for review. I will provide reviewing instructions for you.

Here is the remainder of the process:


How to Prepare for Working with Me

If you agree to this process, please do the following:

I can feel your enthusiasm [for] helping non-native English speakers, and it does make a difference. Please keep on helping people like me.
—Wenbo Mu, MD, Department of Orthopaedics, First Affiliated Hospital of Xinjiang Medical University

When you send your manuscript materials to me, please keep the following in mind:

Therefore, please plan ahead and leave enough time in the schedule for editing to be completed well before your target journal's submission deadline. I usually cannot schedule emergency editing.

I prefer to operate my business without employees, so when you contract with KOK Edit for editing, you can be assured that I am the editor, with extensive editing skills and experience, who is polishing your documents. I also do not subcontract my projects to other editors. However, if you need an editorial service that I do not provide, such as translation, medical writing, design and layout, proofreading, or indexing, I can refer you to my colleagues who have those skills.

A few words about my business’s name, KOK Edit: It is pronounced “Kay-Oh-Kay Edit,” because I created its name by using my personal initials, KOK, which stand for Katharine O’Moore-Klopf.