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[yoyoid]

I submitted my coauthored paper to one of the leading journals in my field (kind of STEM) and got an R&R. I submitted my revised version and today, 2 months later, got a response from the editor in chief. S/he sent me my Word MS with edits and comments in track changes in almost every line in my paper! This isn't a copy-edit job by an outside editor but by the editor in chief huself. I'm wondering whether I really should include hu as a co-author. None of my actual co-authors have ever paid such serious attention to any paper I've written! My husband says that he would only do this kind of thing for the first page of a MS submitted to him by one of his grad students (I'm a postdoc) and my PhD advisors too never did anything like this. The editor in chief is a professor at a good research university. So it isn't like hu hasn't got other stuff to do. Have you ever seen anything like this?!

[larryc]

Are the edits good?

[bwwm1]

I submitted my coauthored paper to one of the leading journals in my field (kind of STEM) and got an R&R. I submitted my revised version and today, 2 months later, got a response from the editor in chief. S/he sent me my Word MS with edits and comments in track changes in almost every line in my paper! This isn't a copy-edit job by an outside editor but by the editor in chief huself. I'm wondering whether I really should include hu as a co-author. None of my actual co-authors have ever paid such serious attention to any paper I've written! My husband says that he would only do this kind of thing for the first page of a MS submitted to him by one of his grad students (I'm a postdoc) and my PhD advisors too never did anything like this. The editor in chief is a professor at a good research university. So it isn't like hu hasn't got other stuff to do. Have you ever seen anything like this?!

Yes. I've had editors spend a good bit of time going over my articles. The editor of the highest ranked journal I've published in did this. I don't think it's so unusual. I'm in history, so perhaps it's a bit different in your field.

[msparticularity]

Are the edits good?

My additional question is about the nature of the edits: are they for clarity and correctness, or is this editor making changes that relate to style and preference? If the former, I think you could regard this as quite helpful, and a sign that your work is very interesting but your writing is not quite as polished as it might be yet. If the changes are more stylististic (and arbitrarily so), I would find it quite intrusive for an editor to remake my manuscript as if s/he had written it. 

[tuxedo_cat]

S/he sent me my Word MS with edits and comments in track changes in almost every line in my paper! This isn't a copy-edit job by an outside editor but by the editor in chief huself. I'm wondering whether I really should include hu as a co-author. None of my actual co-authors have ever paid such serious attention to any paper I've written! 

Assuming these are good edits, I think you should offer a profuse "thank you" when you send back the changes, and add some version of the bolded comment above (even if you feel that this is a little bit control-freakish).  Especially if you are a young scholar.

[seniorscholar]

I did extensive editing (for length and clarity . . . and grammar) for entries in a reference book I edited almost 25 years ago. Really really extensive when a scholar assigned 750 words sent 3500 (if I'd accepted all entries as written, the volume would have been 3 million words instead of the 1 million in my contract). Eight or ten people wrote angry letters withdrawing their contribution; twenty or so responded with grateful thanks; and one even sent me a copy of his/her monograph published a few years later with repeated thanks for showing him/her how to write strong prose.

[yoyoid]

Are the edits good?

They are kind of annoying. Any colorful language has been blanded down and neutralized. But of course there are plenty which do improve clarity.

So apparently the consensus is this wouldn't be so unusual at a top journal in the humanities.

[hiddendragon]

Every line sounds kind of excessive.  I can understand some rephrasing for clarity, grammar checks, etc., but if it's to the point where your unique, original voice is lost, I'd be a bit ticked off.  Making something more neutral might be good politically and I'd welcome that.  Sometimes, I have a tendency to be too passionate so editors who help me tone down is a plus for me.  Don't touch my poetry lines, though!

[tuxedo_cat]

So apparently the consensus is this wouldn't be so unusual at a top journal in the humanities.

Well, I don't know how common this degree of editing would be for a humanities journal.  But of course many of us chose a humanities field because we were probably pretty good with language to begin with.  As someone who teaches writing I can tell you that "colorful" language is often a sensitive area of revision for writers, so I get why you may find this annoying.  But if it is sacrificed in favor of the clarity of the argument, then the editor has probably done you a favor, especially if any of that colorful language is from a more informal idiom.  And you can also be grateful that it was the journal's editor and *not* an outside copyeditor who, in my experience, can make a complete mess of your prose.

[sagit]

I can't imagine any of the editors that I know doing this for journals in my field - there is just no way that they would have the time!!

You asked about whether this person should be a co-author.  I would say no.  It is not as if you invited their collaboration - you're just trying to get your work published.  They are just trying to get into the best (in their view) possible form for their journal so that the journal continues to look good.  At least that's my take on it.

[yoyoid]

I was kind of joking about the co-author bit. For example, I used the words "surprisingly sluggish" to paraphrase what a paper I was citing said about the policy response to some event. These were words that that author used themself. The editor changed that to "slow".

[tuxedo_cat]

I was kind of joking about the co-author bit. For example, I used the words "surprisingly sluggish" to paraphrase what a paper I was citing said about the policy response to some event. These were words that that author used themself. The editor changed that to "slow".

Then. . . shouldn't they have been in quotation marks?  That's generally pretty good armor against an editor's pen!

[snowbound]

When  I was on the staff of a high-ranked humanities journal, I sometimes had to edit practically every sentence of a submission, occasionally even re-writing an entire sentences rathe than attempting the hopeless job of getting it into shape with a few judicious word or syntactical changes.  Frankly, I would be very upset if anyone did this with my own writing, but my articles (if not my forum posts!) are very well-crafted (This is not just my own evaluation). But not everyone is equally skilled at writing.  Many articles required hardly any editing at all, just very minor copyediting, but some others were a holy mess.   Some very smart and learned and insightful people are not good writers, esp. when their discipline is not strongly writing-oriented. I would put a lot of effort into getting such writing up to the standard of the ideas that the authors were trying to express--and up to the high standard of writing required by the journal. I got many messages from authors expressing their delight at what I had done to make their prose clear and graceful.  

So you should probably be grateful that the editor has given your article a (probably) much-needed makeover that will allow your ideas to present the best possible face to the world. I agree with Yoyoid that the kind of editing we're discussing here is not the sort of thing that an outside copyeditor would likely do well (the outside person who copyedited my book was absolutely clueless).  As for blanding down your colorful language . . .  make all the suggested changes, then look again objectively at the sentences with language you would like to retain.  Maybe your colorful metaphor (let's say) was confusing or awkward or had a jarring tone or clashed with the metaphor in the preceding sentence, in which case your piece is better off without it.  ON the other hand, maybe its removal was just collateral damage from when the sentence was re-written to solve other problems, in which case it could and should  be worked in again.  The editor will be willing to consider such re-written sentences or explain why the metaphor or whatever was a problem--especially if you've thanked them profusely for their the work they've put into improving your article.

On preview: Yes, "surprisingly sluggish" is livelier language than "slow," but is this judgmental phrase supported in your article?  Is it immediately clear why the reader should be surprised at the slowness of the response? And do you give some support for the implication that the slow responders were to blame from their slowness? ("Sluggish" suggests some culpability; "slowness" is more neutral in that respect).  You say the author you are presumably citing used this phrase, but your readers have not read this source and cannot be expected to make sense of "surprisingly sluggish" if your article doesn't make that clear.  

If your article does indeed justify the phrase "surprisingly sluggish," argue for its inclusion!  When I have presented thought-out reasons for queried word-choices, editors have gone along with it.  

ON further preview: Right, you need quote marks, of course, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wise to include the judgmental " 'surprisingly sluggish' " rather than the neutral "slow."      

[hulkhogan]

Is the response from the editor another R&R or is it an "accept with minor changes"? In the latter case, I'd just make the changes, get the publication, add a line to my vita, and move on.

[lasquires]

Some journals do have a specific, even recognizable prose style that they tend to rigorously enforce on authors. People who have published in PMLA have told me that their manuscripts were edited pretty heavily to fit the journal's style. For example, shorter paragraphs were requested in order to better suit the two-column format.