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

Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
"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,

It doesn't matter to me whether the paper contains Britishisms or
Americanisms. Because I'm a native americanophone, however, my -isms
tend to be American. Because most journals don't care whether the
spelling is British or American, I will change the style only if it's
necessary to keep it consistent throughout the paper. If the journal
requires one brand of spelling or the other -- some do -- I leave what
I know to be well-formed Britishisms alone for journals that require
BrE spelling and change all -isms to American for journals that require
AmE spelling.

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.

Word's spellchecker helps there. Some journal editors are happy that
they can understand the data and content of the papers they publish,
but others are unwilling to pay their own copyeditors to revise any of
the mechanics and send submissions back for reformatting or respelling
or whatever.

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!

No, they don't and haven't for years.

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.

Same in Taiwan and Japan.

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.

--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.
Cynical by nature, by habit, and by choice.
Native speaker of American; posting from Taiwan.
"It has come to my attention that my opinions are not universally
shared; ergo, they are not in the public domain." Anymouse.
.

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