We recently ran a survey asking if an acknowledgement is required if somebody proof reads your paper. The results revealed that 55.6% said that no acknowledgement is required, with 44.4% saying that an acknowledge should be provided. However, these results come with some caveats, which we explore in this article.
The survey
The question we posed was:
“If somebody uses a proof reading service (which might include adding refs, changing the structure, correcting grammar etc.) do you think they should acknowledge this in the paper, on the basis that the reader/employer/supervisor has a right to know that they received help?“
The answers that could be chosen were “Yes acknowledgement reqd.” and “No need to acknowledgement“.
The survey ran for about seven days (11th August 2021 to 18th August 2021).
Figure 1 shows the survey as presented on Twitter.
Survey results
The survey attracted 36 responses, with 16 people (44.4%) saying that that an acknowledgement is required 20 people (55.6%) saying that there is no need to acknowledge. These results can be seen in Figure 2. The Twitter result can also be seen here.
Comments on the survey
We provide our thoughts on the survey below.
Survey size
We recognize that a survey size of 36 people is not that large, so we have to bear that in mind when drawing any conclusions.
Survey demographics
In any survey, it is important that we draw our responses from the right demographics. This is often a random set of people from a given subset of the population.
In this survey, this was not possible for a number of reasons.
Firstly, those that participate in the survey are those that follow (or see) our Twitter account. This means that they have an interest in predatory publishing and do not represent the entire scholarly population which, ideally, is where we would like to draw our respondents from.
Secondly, both those that answered yes and no could have ulterior reasons for answering that way. For example, we could have got responses from those that charge for these services and would prefer not to be acknowledged. We could have got responses from supervisors who would prefer their students to acknowledge them.
Thirdly, we could have got duplicate responses from the same person who have more than one Twitter account.
For these reasons, we cannot take the survey too seriously, or at least draw any concrete conclusions.
Survey question
We know that the question was not ideally worded. You can only say so much on a Twitter survey.
However, in hindsight, we should have made the question a little clearer. There is a difference between ONLY proof reading paper, when compared to restructuring, adding references etc. We may run another survey, sometime in the future, where the question will be a little more targeted.
What do we think?
Now the survey is over, we can give our view.
If a proof reader (service provider, whatever you want to call them) does anything above and beyond simply proof reading then we believe that the person(s) who helped should be acknowledged, if not be an author, if the contribution is enough to warrant it.
We also believe that if an author employs a proof reader, then that should be acknowledged. Our argument is that the person reading the paper has the right to know if the author (especially in the case of single authored papers) received help. It is not so much for the scientific/technical/contribution elements of the paper (the reviewers should see to that) but it is for potential employers, promotion panels etc. where the people looking at the paper have an interest whether the person can write good English, rather than having to have it corrected by somebody else, possibly using a paid service.
One of the reason we carried out this survey is because of a paper that asked “Is There a Role for Publication Consultants and How Should Their Contribution be Recognized?” The conclusion of this paper said:
“Readers of academic papers have the right to know who contributed to the paper, whether this is by the list of authors, by the acknowledgments or by the work that is cited. Any help, not represented by the list of authors, should be acknowledged. This is often done by recognizing the funding agency, the efforts of colleagues, software providers etc. This acknowledgment should also extend to publication consultancy services, where assistance has been provided, albeit via a paid for service.“
We thought we would see what others thought.
Twitter Comments
As this poll was running it got a few comments. We have shown some of these below. You can see them on the Twitter post, but this just saves you having to click through to Twitter.
- “I think if you’re being evaluated on the things the service provides, then supervisor/employer should be informed. Otherwise a brief acknowledgment of assistance is nice/thoughtful/completist, but it’s absence IMO wouldn’t be ethically disqualifying.“
- “If the proof-reading would suggest me in the comments to change structure or add some references, I would acknowledge that.“
- “I think there is no immediate answer here. Just proof-reading or correcting grammar needs no acknowledgment if done on a contractual basis, but adding references, changing the structure, etc., is a different thing. And this is not the proof-reader’s job either.“
- “Agreed (sortof), the problem arises when it goes beyond proof reading. We say sortof as does a reader not have the right to know if the author can write fluent English if (say) they were looking at the paper for a job application?“
- “I would say no when it comes to academic papers (but yes for jobs, even though an interview would help sort out the matter in extremis). Otherwise you are placing native speakers at an implicit advantage. After all, as a reader, why would I care about who did the language edit?“
- “An editor doesn’t usually get credit for a novel or other work of literature. Many editors when have a policy that they do not want to be mentioned.“
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