Zoology Editing and Proofreading Services

Six hundred hours of observation, and the paper reports that the animals spent more time foraging in the presence of the intruder. It does not say whether the observer recorded continuously or every five minutes, whether the focal animal was chosen at random or was simply the visible one, or how the animals were handled to fit the collars. Both omissions bear on whether the finding is about the animals or about the method.

We edit what zoologists write — behavioural studies and their sampling methods, field and captive research, ethics and welfare documentation, physiological and functional papers, conservation and population studies, tracking and telemetry work, husbandry and protocol documents, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the behavioural sampling method and the welfare account that sits beside it.

Zoological writing has to carry two things at once, and their failure is a behavioural result whose sampling rule is unstated and an animal procedure described as though nothing happened to the animals. Both are conditions of the work being usable and publishable. We work through these so the sampling method is named exactly — focal, scan, all-occurrence or one-zero — with the interval, the session length and the rule for choosing the subject, since these produce systematically different estimates of the same behaviour and one-zero sampling in particular overestimates duration; so the ethogram is given with each behaviour defined observably rather than by its presumed function, because "playing" and "threatening" are interpretations while a described posture is a record; so observer effects, habituation period and inter-observer reliability are reported; so the welfare and ethics account states the licence or approval, the procedures performed, the anaesthesia and monitoring, the humane endpoints and the fate of the animals, given that a reader and a reviewer both need this and vagueness reads as concealment; so capture, handling and marking are described with any observed effect on subsequent behaviour; so sample sizes distinguish animals from observations; and so any animal lost or excluded is accounted for. Papers written this way get past ethical review and get believed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished data, site locations and licensing material. We are editors rather than zoologists or veterinarians, and we offer no view on methods, welfare judgements or findings. What we can do is make the sampling rule and the welfare account explicit.