Final Proofreading Before Submission

Four kinds of recipient, no two lists alike

PLOS ONE accepts DOC, DOCX, or RTF, and requires LaTeX submissions as PDFs. The title page, abstract, and introduction come first in that order, and the acknowledgments, references, and supporting information captions come last. The full title is limited to 250 characters and the short title to 100, the abstract must not exceed 300 words and must not include citations, and sections are limited to three heading levels.¹

The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting publish a list sharing nothing with that one. A feature script must be no shorter than 80 pages and no longer than 125, in standard industry format, which the rules name as 12 point Courier. Scripts outside that format, or with margins cheated to exceed 125 pages, may have it counted against them in judging. The entrant is responsible for ensuring that no name, address, phone number, or other identifying information appears on the title page or any other page.²

The National Institutes of Health specify the page rather than the prose. Font size must be 11 points or larger, margins at least half an inch on all four sides, and page size no larger than 8.5 by 11 inches. Attachments go in PDF, with filenames of 50 characters or fewer. Applications whose PDF attachments do not conform to those minimums may be withdrawn from consideration.³

Presses ask for different things again. Ohio State University Press requires Word files in Times New Roman, double-spaced, with page numbers, notes built with Word's footnote function, and images supplied separately.⁴ Princeton University Press asks a proposal for a description of a paragraph or two and a fuller one of one to two pages. It also asks for a chapter outline with a paragraph on each chapter, and a list of comparable books giving title, author, publisher, and year.⁵

The last pass is a conformance check, not a reading

Every item on those lists can be verified without a judgment about quality. A page count is a number, Courier is either the typeface or it is not, and a name on a title page is either there or absent. That makes the final pass a different operation from editing, measured against a document somebody else wrote.

It also explains a category of rejection authors find baffling. PLOS ONE states that submissions not meeting its standards for language quality may be rejected. It also requires ethics approval documented in the Methods before submission, and data underlying the findings deposited in a public repository.¹ Its reviewers are asked whether an article is presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English, and whether it adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.⁶ None of those questions is a verdict on the research.

Four things to check in the last pass, in order

Cross-references, numbering, and running heads come first, because the operation that breaks them is the final reordering. Editors Canada includes in proofreading the consistency and accuracy of cross-references, running heads, captions, and hyperlinks.⁷ References come next. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors asks authors to give direct references to original research sources and to verify references against a bibliographic source such as PubMed or against the original document.⁸ A reference list assembled over three years in three reference managers will not survive that check unaided.

Anonymity is third, and where a submission is read blind it cannot be repaired afterward. The Nicholl rules put that responsibility on the entrant.² Microsoft's Document Inspector lists what a Word file carries without showing it on the page. That list includes comments, revision marks from tracked changes, document properties, e-mail headers, send-for-review information, the username, and hidden text.⁹ Microsoft also notes that removed data cannot always be restored.

Completeness is fourth, and it costs the most. Chicago's guidelines require everything an author intends to include, art included, to arrive before copyediting starts.¹⁰ Cornell places the burden of clearing copyrighted material on the author, and counts an author's own earlier publications as material needing clearance.¹¹ Both requirements sit before production rather than inside it.

Where the list and the habit disagree

Where a recipient publishes a requirement, that requirement outranks the general convention, however well established. A title page laid out like every other title page is still wrong if the recipient asked for something else. The list is better read at the start of the final pass than at the end, because the pass is then organized around it.

ICMJE makes the same point in section I.B of its recommendations, telling authors to use them along with individual journals' instructions to authors.¹² The point extends to presses, competitions, committees, and grant bodies. EditFast will proofread against a recipient's published requirements where a client supplies them, and will report what does not conform. Whether a manuscript is ready on its merits is the author's judgment and their reviewers'. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including unpublished manuscripts, submission correspondence, and research data.

Every list named above is published, and none costs anything. They are the cheapest documents in any submission, and usually the last ones a writer opens. Reading one first changes what the rest of the pass is for.