CELEBRATING 130 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE

Data You Can Trust

It is the mission of JBJS, Inc. “to improve musculoskeletal health across the globe by delivering gold-standard information resources for clinicians, researchers, and orthopaedic care teams,” and this focus on delivering high-quality information is reflected in the meticulous copy-editing of every JBJS article.

Copy-editing at JBJS far exceeds what is done at most other scientific journals, some of which do not copy-edit at all. JBJS employs a professional in-house staff of copy-editors who have years (and sometimes decades) of experience with substantive editing of orthopaedic material. JBJS copy-editors spend 10-15 hours on each manuscript and perform a multitude of tasks, including:

• editing for grammar, style, readability, and sense
• checking and cross-checking all numbers and statements in all sections, including abstract, tables, figures, and text
• checking accuracy of medical/technical terms and product/device names
• checking and cross-checking all citations
• screening all images and videos for quality, consistency, and compliance with patient confidentiality

But what matters is not the time and effort JBJS invests in copy-editing; what matters is that the standards of excellence maintained by JBJS copy-editing allow readers to trust in the integrity of JBJS data.

Thus busy clinicians, who have time to only read an abstract, can scan down a table and be sure that any value matches, and is supported by, the data in the paper. Researchers can assess their own findings against percentages in a JBJS article and know that the percentages represent real numerators and denominators that someone checked, and can be confident that a claim of significance is backed up by a p value. And authors can rest assured that their work will be presented in a clear, concise manner, and that their considerable efforts will not be compromised by an inaccurate number, inconsistency, or unintentionally misleading statement.

Click here for more insight into the copy-editing process at JBJS.