Geological Surveys Editing and Proofreading Services

Geological surveys produce work with an unusually long half-life. A map published in 1974 is still consulted, still cited, and still used to decide where to drill, what to insure and whether to build. That permanence changes how the writing must work: the reader in forty years will not be able to ask what a unit boundary was based on, how confident the mapper was, or whether a contact was observed or inferred. If that is not on the map and in the notes, it is gone.

We edit what geological surveys and earth science agencies produce — map notes and accompanying explanatory reports, open file and bulletin reports, stratigraphic and lithological descriptions, geochemical and geophysical survey reports, mineral and energy resource assessments, geohazard reports covering seismicity, landslides and subsidence, groundwater and aquifer characterisation studies, engineering and terrain geology reports for infrastructure, data release documentation and metadata, field procedure manuals and sampling protocols, plain-language summaries for municipalities and the public, and scientific papers prepared for publication. Our editors check that stratigraphic nomenclature is applied consistently, that units and coordinate systems are stated, and that observation is distinguished from interpretation throughout.

Distinguishing what was seen from what was inferred is the discipline that makes a survey's work durable, and it is the first thing lost when a report is written up months after the field season. A contact drawn as a solid line means something different from a dashed one, and if the report describes both simply as "the contact", the map's own convention has been undermined by its explanatory text. We work on these so observed relationships are reported as observations with their station numbers, so inferences are marked as inferences with the reasoning and the alternative that was rejected, so confidence is expressed consistently rather than through a drift of adjectives, and so anything derived from a previous worker's mapping is attributed rather than absorbed. Surveys that hold this line produce reports that a later geologist can revise intelligently instead of having to remap from scratch, which is the real economic value of the archive.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including pre-release data, proprietary industry material and reports under embargo. We are editors rather than geoscientists and offer no view on interpretation, correlation or resource estimation — the science remains entirely yours. What we can do is make the writing precise and internally consistent, and we regularly work with authors writing in English as an additional language.