Ethical Author Services

AJE is deeply committed to ethical practices in our business and throughout research. Our team steadfastly upholds an ethical approach in the delivery of all of our services. We refuse to engage in unethical content and practices at all costs because nothing is worth compromising our personal and professional integrity. As a company, we maintain policies and procedures related to unethical behavior, and we are dedicated to promoting ethics in research through education and information-sharing.

English Language Editing

AJE will:

AJE will not:
  • Provide language editing focused on
    • Grammar
    • Spelling
    • Phrasing
    • Diction
    • Articles
  • Comment upon inconsistencies
  • Maintain the author’s voice, word choice, style, and meaning
  • Provide expertise in the field of study
  • Provide suggestions for unclear sentences/grammar
  • Add or remove spacing between words
  • Comment upon corrections that may be needed to figures and tables
  • Write any portion of the paper
  • Perform content review
  • Identify or address plagiarism
  • Interpret data
  • Organize the paper
  • Make global changes throughout the paper to verb tense or author voice if they are acceptable
  • Reduce word count
  • Perform copy editing (journal-specific requirements, like serial commas)
  • Interpret data or draw conclusions
  • Accept machine translated papers
  • Submit papers on your behalf
  • Become an author on the paper
  • Edit data, variables or numbers, references, or author affiliations

* Note that services that write or rewrite papers without full transparency about their role are acting unethically and that employing this type of unethical service could lead to paper retraction and other risks to your reputation.

** You do not need to include your AJE editors as authors on your paper. Because our editors perform only English language editing, and not content editing and other tasks that merit authorship, they do not qualify for authorship status according to the guidelines outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). However, you are welcome to acknowledge AJE’s assistance in your paper

Translation Services

AJE will:

AJE will not:
  • Maintain the author’s meaning and style
  • Ensure that field-specific terms and phrasing are accurate and consistent
  • Ensure that the meaning is clear, accurate and unambiguous
  • Ensure that the translation reads as if written by a native English speaker
  • Provide a translation free of grammar, spelling and syntax errors
  • Preserve the formatting of the original manuscript
  • Comment upon unclear sentences or terms
  • Write any portion of the paper
  • Add or remove content
  • Perform content review
  • Identify or address plagiarism
  • Interpret data
  • Reorganize the paper
  • Reduce word count
  • Interpret data or draw conclusions
  • Submit papers on your behalf
  • Become an author on the paper
  • Accept manuscripts in draft form
  • Perform copy editing to apply journal-specific requirements

Figures and Illustration Services

AJE will:

AJE will not:
  • Ensure figures comply with journal guidelines by changing:
  • File type
  • Resolution
  • Color space
  • Font
  • Scale
  • Line weights
  • Layout
  • Work with authors to create original artwork and short animations based on the data or model in the paper
  • Change brightness, contrast, or color balance
  • Crop images
  • Vectorize a plot or graph unless we are confident that we can do it with extremely high fidelity
  • Vectorize any primary data, such as spectra or other direct output from laboratory equipment

Formatting

AJE will:

AJE will not:
  • Format your manuscript’s layout, citations, and references in accordance with journal guidelines
  • Reorder your citations and references as needed
  • Fix incorrect information in references based on information in published databases
  • Add missing references
  • Format an ambiguous reference
  • Complete documents such as authorship forms, conflict of interest forms, or CONSORT/PRISMA forms

Our Partners

AJE is a trusted name in the scholarly publishing community. We work with leading universities, institutes, journals, and publishers.

Springer Nature
MRS
Cambridge University Press
IEEE
American Geophysical Union
AuthorAid
PLOS
COPE
Elsevier
Seeding Labs

Additional Resources

Ethics and Author Services Ethics and Author Services
Research Square joins COPE Research Square joins COPE