Lab Groups and Principal Investigators Editing and Proofreading Services

Three years into a project, two people believe they are first author. Both have reasons. One did the experiments, one designed the study and wrote the code, and neither of them is being unreasonable — because nobody wrote anything down at the start, and the conversation that could have taken twenty minutes in year one is now a dispute involving a head of department.

We edit what lab groups and principal investigators produce — lab manuals and group handbooks, authorship and credit expectations documentation, onboarding material for new members, protocols and standard operating procedures for the group, data management and record-keeping requirements, meeting, reporting and supervision arrangements, safety and training documentation for the group, mentoring and career development documentation, project handover material, and group-facing policies on tools, notebooks and reproducibility. Our editors work on the expectations set before there is anything to argue about.

The lab manual's authorship and credit section is the highest-value page a principal investigator will ever write, and its failure is describing a principle. "Authorship follows contribution" is agreed by everyone and settles nothing, because contribution is exactly what is disputed. We work through these so the criteria are stated as the group will apply them, with what specifically earns authorship in this lab — the amount of experimental work, the design contribution, the analysis, the writing — and what does not, such as providing a reagent or a technique without intellectual input; so the ordering convention is stated, covering first, last, equal contribution and how disputes are resolved and by whom, since a named process used before the dispute is worth more than any principle after it; so the timing is fixed — that authorship is discussed when a project starts and revisited at a stated point rather than when a draft exists, given that everything is easier before there is a paper; so what happens when somebody leaves is addressed, including who writes up unfinished work and how long the departing person's claim persists; so data ownership and the obligation to leave usable records is stated as a condition of membership, because a departing postdoc's undocumented analysis is a lost year; so the corresponding author's duties are described rather than assumed; and so the manual says what a member should do if they think the criteria are being applied unfairly. Manuals written this way prevent the dispute rather than adjudicating it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including group documentation, unpublished work and personnel matters. We are editors rather than research or research-integrity advisers, and we offer no view on authorship, credit or group management. What we can do is put the conversation in writing before there is a paper to argue about.