Re: to show/see sb. to the door? [AmE]

On 2008-03-14 17:39:19 +0100, "CyberCypher" <dontbother@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
[...]


Do the authors usually mention you in their acknowledgements?

Not if I can help it. I'm not big on making sure that I get credit for
editing, especially if I know that the author likes to make changes
after I've done a second complete revision or if the editor of the
journal has done much of the work -- that happened a year or so ago
with the Journal of Hand Surgery (European Version), and I so hated
that editor's style that I felt forced to remove the acknowledgment of
my editing assistance. To be fair, though, the editor actually did do
most of the editing work. I had edited the paper twice before the
submission, but the journal editor, a hand surgeon, knew exactly what
he wanted in the article and cut out half the content (I could not have
done that because I'm not an orthopedic surgeon) in addition to
translating my "Americanisms", as one of the reviewers put it, into
"Britishisms",

I think it's only the sillier referees who worry about either "Americanisms" or "Britishisms", and, to be honest, it's been a while since I've seen a report that commented on that at all. Of course, some journals want a particular spelling to be used systematically, but if so it's up to them to deal with it in-house. It's not reasonable to expect a Taiwanese author to know which spellings are AmE and which are BrE, or to use them consistently. Although some Germans seem to have a feel for this, French and Spanish authors usually have no idea, and why should they?

so even if I had liked his style, I would have felt
compelled to remove my name: the editing was essentially his and no
longer mine. Neither of us was acknowledged.

I have a client who told me that one technical editor here complained
that his name should have been included with those of the "other
authors" of the paper. This technical editor is neither a doctor nor a
basic scientist, but he used to visit my client on Sundays to talk
about medicine. My client was really put off by the guy's presumptions
and pretensions.

I imagine the Sunday visits no longer take place! I think I've only once asked for my name to be included among the authors of a paper where I had done very little to deserve it, and although that was more than 30 years ago I still feel ashamed to think about it. Initially I wasn't planning to ask, but I was pissed off because a senior professor in the department, who had contributed even less than I had (zero, in his case) wanted to be included as an author (and was). In France it is regrettably standard to include two or three "authors" who have contributed nothing in particular, but who "need" to have more publications on their CVs. For some reason most people don't seem to consider that the amount of credit one gets for being an author of a paper ought to be inversely proportional to the number of authors.

--
athel

.

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