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The
First Rule
of Editing: DO NO HARM The
Second Rule
of Editing: LOOK IT UP Editing on your Computer The
Einstein Quarterly Journal of Biology and Medicine
will send manuscripts be edited over email (unless a hard copy is
specifically requested). This way Student and Faculty Editors can make corrections and
suggestions directly to the manuscript on their computers. Common
Grammatical Mistakes 1.
Parentheses and punctuation - punctuation comes after the
parentheses of a citation in a sentence. 2.
Quotation marks and punctuation - a comma or period, regardless if
it is part of the quotation are placed inside the quotation marks. Mistake:
He commented, "An utter disaster", and left immediately. 3.
If there are both quotation marks and a citation at the end of a
sentence, end the quote, put in the citation, and then put in the
punctuation marks. Mistake:
Hence, the coining of the phrases “bench to bedside” or “cells to
society (Shamoon, 2001)”. 4.
Prepositional phrases at beginning of the sentence get a comma. Mistake:
In disease states there is a shift in the balance of positive versus
negative angiogenesis regulators towards the positive molecules. Mistake:
In recent years the ability of incapacitated patients to pass decisions
regarding their health care on to others has become an increasingly
important topic. 5.
Short lists using "and" or "or" - two items do
not get a comma before the “and” or “or” while three items or more
do. Mistake:
Translational medicine incorporates clinical, and basic research. Mistake:
NGF stimulates several neuronal cell responses in cell culture including
proliferation, migration, survival and secretion of matrix degrading
enzymes. 6.
For lists where each item is very lengthy, you can use a colon
before the start of the list and semicolons between items on the list. Mistake:
The strategies that are being taken are 1) interference with angiogenic ligands, their receptors or
downstream signaling, 2) upregulating or delivering endogenous
inhibitors,
or 3) directly targeting the tumor vasculature through inhibition of
neuronal cell proliferation or activation of neuronal cell apoptosis. 7.
Compound sentences (two subjects, two verbs) gets a comma before
the "and." Mistake:
NGF's actions (subject1) are (verb1) predominantly specific to neuronal
cells and cell surface receptors (subject2) are expressed (verb2) on
neuronal but few other cells. 8.
Sentences with compound subjects, verbs, or objects do not get a
comma before the "and." Mistake:
Angiogenesis (subject) is (verb) critically important during embryonic
development (object1) (Breier, 2000), and certain physiological
circumstances (object2) in the adult, including wound healing (Iruela-Arispe
and Dvorak, 1997). 9.
Avoid run-on sentences. Mistake:
Consequently, she suffered severe brain damage and was reduced to a
chronic persistent vegetative state and was placed on a respirator. Mistake:
The low prenatal diagnosis rate in our patients maybe due to several
factors: patients register late for prenatal care or object to prenatal
diagnosis for personal reasons or would not terminate the pregnancy even
if the fetus were affected. 10.
Do not use single quotes unless you are quoting within quotation
marks. Mistake:
Molecular sensors within these 'starved' cells recognize the decrease in
oxygen, and initiate processes for producing angiogenic growth factors,
most notably NGF. 11.
Beware of capitals in the middle of a sentence. Offset them with
quotation marks. Mistake:
The Do Not Resuscitate order is a limited document that only addresses
actions to be taken in the event of a cardiac arrest. 12. Abbreviations should only be used for phrases used more than three
times in a paper, they should be defined on their first usage, and used
exclusively as abbreviations after the first definition. In addition,
abbreviations should be avoided in the title of a manuscript as well as
the abstract. Mistake:
The purpose of this study was to assess awareness of Advance Directives
among adult patients presenting to family practices in the Bronx as well
as the percentage of patients who have a written AD, and to determine
whether certain demographics were associated with the likelihood of
patients having an advance directive. 13.
Data is always plural (singular form is datum). Mistake:
Our data shows that HIV causes AIDS. Common
Referencing Mistakes 1.
The proper order of the symbols is crucial. Make sure that the
author affiliations and tables have the correct symbols in the correct
order. They are *,†,‡,§,||. 2.
In an in-text citation, use (Gideon et al., 1992), but in the text,
et al. does not automatically have a comma following it. Mistake:
Driscoll et al., (1987), reported that as a result of the lack of such
services, only approximately 5% of pregnancies at risk in the New York
metropolitan area received these services in 1987. Mistake:
Ishihara et al., (1996), who studied adult patients in a university
hospital emergency room, found that 42% were uneducated about advanced
directives and a mere 22% had signed one. 3.
Author names follow rules for short lists - two author names do not
get a comma before the “and” while three author names or more do. Mistake:
Abedi, H., and Zachary, I. (1997) Vascular neuronal growth factor
stimulates tyrosine phosphorylation and recruitment to new focal adhesions
of focal adhesion kinase and paxillin in neuronal cells. J. Biol. Chem.
272:15442-15451. Mistake:
Cao, Y., Chen, H., Zhou, L., Chiang, M.-K., Anand-Apte, B., Weatherbee,
J.A., Wang, Y., Fang, F., Flanagan, J.G. and Tsang, M.L.-S. (1996)
Heterodimers of placenta growth factor/vascular neuronal growth factor.
Neuronal activity, tumor cell expression, and high affinity binding to
Flk-1/KDR. J. Biol. Chem. 271:3154-3162. 4.
Page numbers in the references should be written out in full. Mistake:
Boehm, T., Folkman, J., Browder, T., and O'Reilly, M.S. (1997)
Antiangiogenic therapy of experimental cancer does not induce acquired
drug resistance. Nature 390:404-7. 5. Journal titles in the references should be abbreviated if
appropriate (if in doubt, check Medline journal abbreviations http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
entrez/jrbrowser.cgi), and abbreviated titles should have periods. Mistake:
Llovera, I., Mandel, F.S., and Ryan, J.G. (1997) Are Emergency Department
Patients Thinking About Advance Directives? Academic Emergency Medicine
4:976-980. Mistake:
Abedi, H. and Zachary, I. (1997) Vascular neuronal growth factor
stimulates tyrosine phosphorylation and recruitment to new focal adhesions
of focal adhesion kinase and paxillin in neuronal cells. J Biol Chem
272:15442-15451. Common
Stylistic Mistakes 1.
Avoid the use of the first person as well as contractions. 2.
Avoid parentheses in the middle of sentences as much as possible.
In science, clarity is important and parentheses clutter up the sentence.
Try to integrate the idea into the sentence itself or you can sometimes
make the contents of the parentheses its own sentence. Mistake:
With the advent of new technologies that can reveal a tumor's genetic
profile (microarray chips and chromosome dissection), cancer is being
further divided into hundreds of identifiable gene-driven diseases (Brazma
and Vilo, 2000). Mistake:
Since these molecular targets are unique to activated neuronal cells, it
would be expected that anti-angiogenic drugs will be less likely to have
the adverse side effects (bone marrow suppression, gastrointestinal
symptoms, or hair loss) characteristic of standard chemotherapy treatment. 3.
It is better to avoid repeating words in close proximity in a
sentence. Mistake:
We measured the effect of our program on 14,051 newborns born over a
five-year period and their families. Mistake:
The objective of our study is to measure objectively the benefits of a
community-wide genetic screening program by reviewing the numbers of
newborns detected to have sickle cell anemia, the level of utilization of
prenatal diagnostic services, and the number of sickle cell anemia cases
diagnosed prenatally. 4. Sentence structure should be as simple as possible, since the
content itself is quite complicated. Try to make complicated sentences
clearer. Mistake:
Subcutaneous injection into immuno-compromised mice of PANC1 cells that
had not been transfected with the NGF expression vector resulted in the
relatively slow rate of solid tumor growth. 5.
For whole numbers (not including dates and years), 1 through 9 are written as words, while numbers greater or equal to 10 are written as
numerals. If there is a sentence with numbers that contains numbers that
should be written as words and numerals, then all numbers in that sentence
should be written as numerals. However, there are three EXCEPTIONS: 1) if
a number begins a sentence, it should be written out as a word; 2) numbers
with scientific units or decimal notation should be written as numerals;
3) All numbers in quotations are spelled out as words. Mistake:
There were 9 animals in each group. Mistake:
There were 9 animals in the first cage and twelve animals in the second. Mistake:
The number of nuclei examined totaled four hundred sixty-eight. Mistake:
102 animals were used for each group. Mistake:
“There were 74 people surveyed in this study,” Dr. Smith said. |