Chemistry Editing and Proofreading Services

Someone in another laboratory runs the reaction and gets nothing back, working from the paper, the scheme, and a reported yield of 78 percent. The paper does not mention that the flask has to be flame-dried under vacuum rather than oven-dried, that the addition is made over twenty minutes rather than poured in, or that the reagent works from one supplier and not from another. All three were known to the author, and none was written down.

The documents we edit for Chemistry

Experimental sections and their reproducibility, synthetic procedures and their step detail, characterization data and its presentation, and the reporting of yield, purity, and scale carry everything a second laboratory needs, and our work for chemists starts there. It also covers supporting information documents, mechanism discussion and its evidence, safety and hazard information inside procedures, journal articles and communications, and dissertation experimental chapters. Our editors work on the section somebody else has to follow at the bench.

What the editing involves

An experimental section is where synthetic chemistry is either reproducible or folklore, and it fails most often by being written as a summary. A paragraph naming the reagents, the solvent, and the temperature is a recipe with the technique taken out. We work through such sections until quantities appear in both mass and moles with the equivalents, because a reader scaling from 200 milligrams to 20 grams needs the stoichiometry, not one day's amounts.

The physical detail deciding whether a procedure works belongs in the text as well: how the glassware was dried, the rate and manner of the addition, the stirring, the color changes that mark progress, and the point at which the reaction is judged complete. These details separate a working procedure from a failing one, and they are omitted almost universally. A line reporting that the solution turned from pale yellow to deep red over five minutes tells a reader the reaction has begun. A line reporting that the mixture was stirred cold does not.

The workup deserves steps rather than an outcome. A sentence saying that the mixture was worked up and purified conceals the emulsion that forms when the quench is added too quickly. Purification needs its stationary phase, its eluent ratio, and the behavior of the fractions, since a compound that streaks on silica is a different afternoon from one eluting cleanly at 20 percent ethyl acetate.

Characterization should report what was observed rather than what was expected, with the shifts, the couplings, the mass, the purity method, and any impurity left in the sample. The yield needs the scale it was obtained at, and whether it is an average or a single run. Yields fall on scale-up, and a best result of 78 percent reported without the runs at 51, 55, and 60 percent around it is the quiet dishonesty of the discipline. A reagent or supplier that mattered should be named, and sections written this way get reproduced.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including unpublished procedures, data, and manuscripts. We are editors, not chemists or safety advisors, and we offer no view on a procedure, a hazard, or a characterization. What we can do is put the technique back into the recipe.