Physics Editing and Proofreading Services

The measurement is quoted as 4.183 ± 0.006. The statistical uncertainty took a month of running to establish and is quoted to four significant figures. The systematic uncertainty — the calibration, the detector acceptance, the background model, the temperature drift over the run — is a single number arrived at in a paragraph, and it is three times larger.

We edit what physicists write — experimental papers and their uncertainty analyses, instrument and detector descriptions, theoretical and computational papers, condensed matter and materials physics, particle and nuclear physics reports, optics and photonics work, technical notes and collaboration documents, and theses, articles and proposals. Our editors work on the treatment of systematic uncertainty.

Systematic uncertainty is where a physics result is either credible or overstated, and its failure is a single number attached to the end of a measurement without an account of where it came from. The statistical error describes the sample; the systematic describes everything the experiment did not control. We work through these so each systematic contribution is listed separately with the effect it accounts for and the method used to estimate it, since a reader assessing a discrepancy with another experiment needs the breakdown and not the total; so the estimation method is stated — a variation of an analysis choice, an auxiliary measurement, a simulation study, or a judgement — because a judgement honestly labelled is better than a number of unknown provenance; so correlations between contributions and with other experiments are addressed where they matter, given that adding correlated systematics in quadrature understates them; so any contribution that dominates is discussed rather than tabulated, as that is the one limiting the result; so the effect of a systematic on the central value is distinguished from its effect on the uncertainty; so blinding, if used, is described with when the box was opened; and so the comparison with previous results states which systematics are shared. Papers written this way are the ones that get combined into world averages.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished results, collaboration documents and material before release. We are editors rather than physicists, and we offer no view on measurements, uncertainties or their interpretation. What we can do is make the systematic budget legible.