Geography Editing and Proofreading Services

Deprivation and poor health are strongly associated at the level of the local authority. They are more weakly associated at the level of the small area, and at the level of the household the relationship changes shape entirely. All three findings are correct. A paper that reports one of them without saying which unit it used has published a claim that cannot be located.

We edit what geographers write — quantitative spatial analyses, GIS and mapping documentation, urban and regional studies, human geography fieldwork and ethnography, physical geography and fieldwork reports, remote sensing analyses, political and economic geography papers, methodology and positionality sections, and theses, papers and grant applications. Our editors work on the scale at which a claim holds.

Scale is the geographer's central problem, and the failure is a finding stated without the unit it was measured at. Relationships between variables change with the size and shape of the areas used, so the unit is part of the result. We work through these so the spatial unit of analysis is named with its size, number and source, since census tracts, wards, postcode sectors and grid cells are different objects and produce different coefficients; so the modifiable areal unit problem is addressed where the argument depends on it rather than cited as a caveat, because a result that appears at one aggregation and not another is a finding about scale; so aggregate results are not read down to individuals, given that the ecological fallacy remains the commonest error in applied spatial work; so boundaries are described as what they are — administrative, physical, historical or drawn by the author — and dated, as boundary changes silently break time series; so spatial dependence is addressed rather than left in the residuals; so projection, resolution and any resampling are stated for raster work; and so the claim is written at the scale it was demonstrated at, with the scales it was not tested at named. Papers written this way can be built on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, fieldwork material and locations that should not be disclosed. We are editors rather than geographers, and we offer no view on methods, spatial statistics or findings. What we can do is tie the claim to its scale.