Botany Editing and Proofreading Services

A paper reports that a species responds to drought in a particular way. Forty years later somebody discovers the species was misidentified — it was a closely related taxon, or the genus has since been split, and the plants in that experiment are now called something else. Whether the paper's result survives that discovery depends entirely on whether a specimen was pressed, labelled and put somewhere findable.

We edit what botanists write — specimen citation and voucher documentation, taxonomic treatments and their diagnoses, floristic and vegetation survey reports, nomenclature and typification passages, ecological and physiological papers using named taxa, herbarium and collection documentation, identification keys and their construction, conservation assessments and their evidence, and horticultural and applied plant science writing. Our editors work on the citation that ties a result to an actual plant.

Voucher and specimen citation is what makes botanical work permanent, and its failure is a species name with nothing behind it. A name is a hypothesis about identity and it is revised constantly; a specimen is a physical object that can be re-examined. We work through these so every taxon used in a study is cited to a voucher with the collector, the number, the date, the locality and the herbarium acronym, since this is the only mechanism by which a result outlives a taxonomic revision; so the authority for the name is given at first use with the source of the determination — whether the authors identified it, a named specialist did, or it came labelled from a supplier — because these carry different weight; so any material that was not vouchered is declared as such, given that cultivated accessions and commercially sourced seed are frequently the weakest link and pretending otherwise is worse than admitting it; so the locality is given with coordinates and enough detail to relocate the population, as this is what makes a study repeatable in a way a name never can be; so a taxonomic decision is stated as a decision with the concept followed, since two authors using the same name for different circumscriptions produce a literature that cannot be synthesised; so the type material is cited where a name is being applied narrowly; and so images or sequences are linked to the voucher rather than to the name. Citations written this way survive the next revision.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished collections, determinations and manuscripts. We are editors rather than botanists or taxonomists, and we offer no view on identification, nomenclature or circumscription. What we can do is tie the result to a plant somebody can look at again.