As an Editor, you may receive manuscripts where the quality of the written language is so poor that you, your Associate Editors and Reviewers are unable to accurately assess the merit of the work.
In these cases, you may need to return the manuscript back to the authors for language correction before sending out to peer review. In other cases, reviewers may comment during peer-review that the written language needs to be corrected prior to proper assessment and/or publication.
For some researchers, writing in English is difficult. It is a notoriously tricky language to master - where even the most subtle change in the order of words can drastically change the emphasis of a sentence. Read more about why learning the English language is so difficult.
At Springer Nature, we want to provide assistance and help to make the peer-review process streamlined for Editors, and informative for authors.
We provide free online resources on to how to improve their English in their manuscript (see the links below). Authors also have the option to use a professional English language editing service. Springer Nature offers two such services - Nature Research Editing Service and American Journal Experts (AJE). These services are strictly independent from the Editorial and peer-review process.
Where possible, all of this information is presented to authors where it is most useful - for example in the submission instructions for our journals.
