Cognitive Science Editing and Proofreading Services

A paper is about attention. What was measured was reaction time to a probe following a cue, in an undergraduate sample, on a screen. Somewhere between the construct and the measure there are four decisions, each defensible, and together they determine whether the paper is about attention at all — and most papers describe the measure and name the construct without ever connecting them.

We edit what cognitive scientists write — construct definition and operationalisation sections, experimental design and task descriptions, results and their interpretation as evidence about a construct, model and computational implementation descriptions, preregistrations and their analysis plans, replication and reanalysis reports, review and theoretical papers, thesis chapters and grant applications, and interdisciplinary writing for neuroscience or linguistics audiences. Our editors work on the step from the construct to the measure.

Operationalisation is where cognitive science is either about something or about a task, and its failure is a named construct and an unexamined measure. Reaction time is not attention; it is a number that may index attention under assumptions worth stating. We work through these so the construct is defined before the task, in terms that could be satisfied by more than one measure, since a construct defined by its measure is circular and the circularity is invisible once the field adopts a paradigm; so the assumptions linking the measure to the construct are stated, covering what else could produce the same pattern — motor preparation, strategy, arousal, task difficulty — because these are the alternatives a reviewer will raise and the paper should raise first; so the task's own demands are described, given that an effect may live in the response mapping rather than in the process of interest; so the convergent measure is reported where one exists, or its absence acknowledged, as a single-paradigm claim about a mental process is weaker than the field's writing usually admits; so the sample is described with what limits the generalisation, particularly where undergraduates are standing in for humans; so any computational model is stated with what it would predict differently from the alternative; and so the conclusion is written about the measure and then, separately, about the construct. Papers written this way survive the replication era.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, preregistrations and manuscripts. We are editors rather than cognitive scientists, and we offer no view on constructs, tasks or inference. What we can do is make the step from the construct to the measure visible.