Entomology Editing and Proofreading Services

A new species is described from four specimens. The description runs to a page of measurements and a habitus photograph, and it distinguishes the animal from nothing in particular. Twenty years later somebody with a tray of similar-looking insects has no way to decide whether theirs is that species, and the name has become a problem rather than a tool.

We edit what entomologists write — species descriptions and taxonomic revisions, identification keys, morphological and genitalic descriptions, faunistic surveys and checklists, pest and integrated management studies, pollinator and biological control work, molecular phylogenetic papers, collection and voucher documentation, and monographs, papers and theses. Our editors work on the description that has to serve identification.

A species description is a working instrument, and its failure is a list of characters without a diagnosis. Measurements describe the specimens in front of the author; a diagnosis tells a later reader how to tell this animal from the ones it will be confused with. We work through these so the diagnosis is written against the specific taxa the species could be mistaken for and names them, since "differs from all congeners" is not usable at a microscope; so the diagnostic characters are states rather than impressions, because "pronotum relatively broad" cannot be applied and "pronotum 1.4–1.6 times as wide as long" can; so the type material is listed with its full label data, depository and unique identifiers, given that a name without a traceable holotype is difficult to fix later; so genitalic characters are described with the preparation method and figured from a stated aspect, as these are the decisive characters in most groups and the aspect determines the outline; so variation across the material is reported rather than a single specimen's values presented as the species; so any molecular data is tied to a voucher specimen and an accession; and so the etymology, distribution and known biology are given separately from the diagnosis. Descriptions written this way are still working decades later.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished descriptions, nomenclatural acts pending publication and locality data for sensitive taxa. We are editors rather than taxonomists, and we offer no view on nomenclature, synonymy or identification. What we can do is make the description usable by the next reader.