Demography Editing and Proofreading Services

A fertility rate of 1.6 is not a statement about women. It is a ratio, and the interesting part is underneath the line: which women, observed over what period, and whether the figure describes a cohort's completed childbearing or a single year's timing. Confuse those two and a paper can announce a collapse in family size that turns out to be a two-year postponement.

We edit what demographers write — fertility, mortality and migration analyses, life table and decomposition work, projection documentation and assumption statements, census and register-based studies, survey methodology and weighting sections, population reports for governments and agencies, cause-of-death and cause-deleted analyses, event-history and survival chapters, and theses and funding applications. Our editors work on the rate and what sits beneath it.

Every demographic measure is a numerator over an exposed population, and the failure is a rate whose denominator is left implicit. A number of events means nothing until the reader knows who was at risk of experiencing them and for how long. We work through these so the denominator is specified as person-years of exposure rather than a headcount, since a mid-year population is an approximation that breaks down under rapid growth or migration; so period and cohort measures are labelled and never mixed, because the total fertility rate is a synthetic figure describing a hypothetical woman and completed cohort fertility describes real ones; so tempo effects are separated from quantum effects where the argument turns on them, given that postponement depresses period rates without changing how many children are eventually born; so rates are age-standardised when populations are compared and the standard used is named, as an unstandardised mortality comparison between a young and an old population is arithmetic rather than epidemiology; so the open-ended top age interval is stated with how it was closed; so migration is defined by its duration criterion, since a three-month and a twelve-month definition produce different countries; and so projections separate the assumption from the result. Papers written this way survive the reader who checks the arithmetic.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished estimates, microdata analyses and reports under embargo. We are editors rather than demographers or statisticians, and we offer no view on estimates, methods or projections. What we can do is make the denominator visible.