Reference and Encyclopedia Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

Reference publishing sells a promise that everything else in publishing avoids making: that the thing you look up will be right, and will be right in the same way as everything next to it. A single work may run to millions of words written by hundreds of contributors who never speak to each other, each an expert with strong views about their own subject and no visibility of the entry three pages away that contradicts them. The editorial apparatus holding that together is the product.

We edit what reference, encyclopedia and dictionary publishers produce — entries across subject areas, entry templates and length bands, contributor guidelines and specimen entries, headword lists and coverage plans, cross-reference and see-also systems, neutrality and balance policies for contested subjects, currency and revision cycle documentation, source and citation standards for entries, front matter and user guidance, abbreviation and convention lists, style guides covering names, dates, transliteration and units, online edition and update policies, and licensing material for institutional customers. Our editors work across a whole work rather than entry by entry, because consistency is the thing a reference user actually buys.

The entry lead is where reference writing is made or lost, and the discipline it requires is unnatural for experts. A contributor who has spent thirty years on a subject opens with what is interesting about it; a user arriving from a cross-reference needs first to know what it is, in a sentence that stands alone. We work on leads so the first sentence defines rather than characterises, so it is self-sufficient for a reader who arrived from anywhere, so any contested definition is signalled at the point of definition rather than in a later paragraph, and so the level of assumed knowledge matches the work's stated audience rather than the contributor's colleagues. We then check the lead against the entries either side of it in length, register and depth, since a work where one entry runs to a scholarly essay and its neighbour to forty words is not a reference work but a collection. And we chase every cross-reference to something that exists, which in a large revision is where most of the errors are.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished entries, contributor correspondence and revision plans. We are editors rather than subject specialists across the fields your work covers, and we offer no view on the substance or accuracy of any entry. What we can do is make the work consistent, the leads usable and the apparatus sound.