Neuroscience Editing and Proofreading Services

A cluster of activation appears in the figure, coloured, on a template brain, with a coordinate and a label. Behind it are several dozen decisions: the smoothing kernel, the model of the haemodynamic response, the motion criterion, the cluster-forming threshold, the correction method, and whether the mask covered the whole brain. Change three of them and the cluster may not be there.

We edit what neuroscientists write — imaging studies and their analysis sections, electrophysiology and recording papers, behavioural neuroscience, computational and modelling work, animal studies and their ethics documentation, clinical and translational neuroscience, systematic reviews, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on analysis decisions and their disclosure.

Neuroimaging and electrophysiology results are the product of long analysis pipelines, and the failure is a figure presented as an observation when it is the output of choices. The pipeline is part of the result and belongs in the paper. We work through these so the preprocessing is reported completely with the software and version, since results differ measurably between packages and between versions of the same package; so the statistical threshold is stated as both its components — the cluster-forming threshold and the corrected significance level — because these are frequently confused and a liberal forming threshold with a corrected p is not the same as a stringent one; so the correction method and the search space it applied to are named, given that a whole-brain correction and a small volume correction in a region chosen after looking are different claims; so any region of interest is described with how it was defined and when, as an ROI drawn around an observed cluster is circular; so motion, artefact rejection and exclusion criteria are given with how many participants and trials each removed; so effect sizes and coordinates are reported with the template space; and so analyses that were run and did not work are disclosed. Papers written this way replicate more often, which is the field's central problem.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, participant information and analyses in progress. We are editors rather than neuroscientists, and we offer no view on methods, analysis choices or findings. What we can do is make the pipeline visible alongside the result.