Chemistry Editing and Proofreading Services

Somebody in another laboratory tries the reaction and gets nothing. They have the paper, the scheme and the yield, and what they do not have is the fact that the flask has to be flame-dried rather than oven-dried, that the addition takes twenty minutes rather than being poured in, and that the reagent from one supplier works and another does not. All three were known to the author and none was written down.

We edit what chemists write — experimental sections and their reproducibility, synthetic procedures and their step detail, characterisation data and its presentation, yield, purity and scale reporting, supporting information documents, mechanism discussion and its evidence, safety and hazard information within procedures, journal articles and communications, and thesis experimental chapters. Our editors work on the experimental section somebody else has to follow.

The experimental section is where synthetic chemistry is either reproducible or folklore, and its failure is a procedure written as a summary. A paragraph naming reagents, a solvent and a temperature is a recipe with the technique removed. We work through these so quantities are given in both mass and moles with the equivalents, since a reader scaling the reaction needs the stoichiometry and not just the amounts used; so the physical detail that determines success is stated — how the glassware was dried, the rate and manner of addition, the stirring, the colour changes that mark progress, the exact point at which the reaction is judged complete — because these are the variables that separate a working procedure from a failing one and they are omitted almost universally; so the workup is described as steps rather than as an outcome, given that "the mixture was worked up and purified" hides the emulsion that forms if the quench is too fast; so the purification is specified with the stationary phase, the eluent ratio and the fraction behaviour; so the characterisation reports what was observed rather than what was expected, with the shifts, the couplings, the mass and the purity method, and any impurity that remained; so the yield is stated with the scale it was obtained at and whether it is an average, since yields fall on scale-up and a single best run reported as the yield is the discipline's quiet dishonesty; and so a reagent or supplier that mattered is named. Sections written this way get reproduced.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished procedures, data and manuscripts. We are editors rather than chemists or safety advisers, and we offer no view on procedures, hazards or characterisation. What we can do is put the technique back into the recipe.