STEM vs HSS: what good academic editing means in each field

Academic publishing talks constantly about the need for good editing. The phrase gets used as though everyone already agrees on what it covers.

Ask a physicist. Then ask a historian. The answers will not match, and neither will the answers their journals give.

A sentence that a chemistry editor would cut as decoration can be the load-bearing beam of a historian's argument. A first-person aside that looks self-indulgent in a methods section is ordinary practice in the introduction to an anthropology article. The gap is widest between STEM and HSS, which stands for the humanities and social sciences.

Editing in STEM: precision before polish

Editing a STEM paper means cutting whatever blurs the record: idioms, decoration, padding, and phrasing that can be read two ways. Your terminology and your tables get checked against what the field and the target journal currently use. What remains should let another researcher follow your method and test it.

In the sciences, a paper has to let another researcher follow what you did and check whether it holds. Structure is largely fixed. Most empirical articles follow IMRAD: introduction, methods, results, and discussion, which is the most common norm for original research articles.¹

Good editing in STEM fields usually means:

• Cutting stylistic decoration. Idioms, metaphors, and semantically fuzzy phrasing all invite more than one reading. A reader checking your method should never have to guess which reading you meant.
• Checking and unifying technical terminology. Proper names, specialist phrases, abbreviations, and units have to match what the field currently uses. An editor who cannot verify this against the literature of your discipline will quietly introduce errors.
• Keeping the logic visible. Hypotheses introduced clearly, assumptions stated, results kept separate from conclusions, and no detours between them.
• Reviewing how the data are presented. Tables, figures, and diagrams should be readable on their own, without the main text propping them up, and they should follow the conventions of the target journal.
• Meeting formal requirements. Layout, citation style, table formatting, abstract length, bibliographic conventions.² Editorial offices check compliance first, and a submission can come back before anyone reads the research.

The work here is elimination. Ambiguity, padding, and imprecise phrasing go, so that the style stops competing with the data for the reader's attention.

What the journals actually say about voice

Nature Portfolio and APA Style both encourage the active voice, and APA says plainly that you may write I and we about your own research. The passive keeps its place in methods sections, where the agent adds nothing. Look up your target journal's guide for authors before you change a single sentence.

Authors trained outside the English-speaking world are often told that scientific English requires the passive voice and forbids we. Here is what the journals print.

Nature Portfolio, in its guidance for authors: "Using the active voice ('we performed the experiment...') typically helps readers better understand concepts and results described in a paper."³

The Purdue Online Writing Lab, summarizing APA Style: "APA Style encourages using the active voice ('We interpreted the results ...')."⁴ On person it is explicit: "When writing in APA Style, you can use the first person point of view when discussing your research steps ('I studied ...') and when referring to yourself and your co-authors ('We examined the literature ...')."⁵

The passive still does real work in specific places. Methods sections in many laboratory fields lean on it, because the agent carries no information: everyone knows who ran the gel. Read the guide for authors of your target journal before you rewrite anything.

An editor who converts every active sentence into a passive one, on the grounds that this is how science is written, is applying a rule the major journals do not print.

Editing in the humanities and social sciences: argument and voice

In the humanities and social sciences, form carries the argument, so the editor's job is to keep your voice audible while the prose gets tighter. That means checking terms against the school of thought you write from, watching rhythm and tone, holding quotation in check, and explaining local references to readers abroad.

Here form carries meaning. Authors build narratives, use metaphor, quote at length, and rely on cultural allusion. The question of why something matters often does more work than the description of what happened.

In the manuscripts we see, even the more formal journals in economics and sociology allow figurative language and a first-person frame, usually in the introduction and the conclusion, where the author's position is part of the argument. An HSS article is a move in an ongoing conversation. An editor who treats it as a summary of existing knowledge will flatten the thing that made it publishable.

Good editing in HSS fields usually means:

• Supporting the author's voice. If you use essayistic or figurative language on purpose, a good editor strengthens that choice within the limits the journal sets. Active voice and first-person narration are common here, and often recommended.
• Checking terminology against schools of thought. The same term can carry different meanings in two traditions inside one discipline. This takes an editor who knows the literature and reads with suspicion.
• Listening to rhythm and tone. Correctness is the floor. Above it sits the question of whether the prose carries the argument or drags on it.
• Reshaping structure deliberately. Composition should follow the logic of the argument, or bend to formal requirements when it has to, while the piece keeps its character.
• Working with cultural and linguistic context. An editor can propose a footnote explaining a local reference, an idiom, a concept, or a name that an international reader will not recognize. If you write about your own national context for a global journal, this is where much of the editorial work happens.
• Keeping quotation under control. Your voice and your sources need clear separation, so your own line of argument stays audible through the citations and paraphrase.

Formal compliance matters in HSS too. In these submissions, though, most of the journal's requirements land in proofreading and formatting, while the substantive work sits in copyediting and stylistic editing.

Editors Canada, the national professional association for editors in Canada, separates the stages cleanly. Copy editing is "Editing to ensure correctness, accuracy, consistency, and completeness." Stylistic editing is "Editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language." Proofreading is "Examining material after layout or in its final format to correct errors in textual and visual elements."⁶

That distinction matters when you commission work. In our experience, ordering a proofread for a manuscript that needs stylistic editing is the expensive mistake authors make most often.

Where authors and editors collide

Translated manuscripts and interdisciplinary texts produce most of the disagreements. A humanities author reads the edit and sees a flattened text, the nuance sanded off and the rhythm of the argument broken. A natural sciences author reads a different edit and complains that the digressions and the extra words survived.

Good editing is an act of interpretation. 3 questions decide what it should do:

• What is the communicative purpose? Persuading reviewers, reaching a general audience, reporting to a funder.
• Who is the audience? A narrow group of specialists, an interdisciplinary panel, the general public.
• What is the genre? A research article, a monograph chapter, a conference abstract, a grant application.

The editor as a translator between conventions

A professional editor works on your language and your communication at the same time. That requires understanding the rhetorical conventions of your discipline: how authority gets built, how an argument gets organized, how sentences are shaped, and where the limits of stylistic freedom sit in your field.

The same editor has to read the formal requirements of a journal, a publisher, or a funding body precisely and apply them, often at the level of editorial microsurgery.

As more research crosses disciplinary lines, the ability to switch between academic registers and institutional expectations becomes part of the basic job description.

If you are preparing a manuscript and you are unsure which of these your text actually needs, tell us the discipline and the target journal, and request a quote.