Doctoral thesis and academic papers

Three main key tasks are undertaken:

 

— The cleaning gets rid of mispellings, typographic mistakes or any other element that hinders reading comprehension.

 

— The normalization corrects the mistakes according to the grammatical and orthographic rules that have been agreed on with the client.

 

— The unification is used where no specific rule exists or when several rules may be of application. This includes different typographic resources that are common in texts: bolds, italics, quotation marks, capital letters, etc. During proofreading, special care is devoted to the unification of the text.

 

We are familiar with research documents, papers belonging to any academic field and different quotation systems.

 

One of the most complex issues when composing an academic paper refers to quotations, which may be inserted in the text or in footnotes. Quotations must follow some normalization rules, so that they are uniform all along the document, therefore providing the reader with pertinent, homogenized and organized information.

 

One of the tasks of orthotypographical correction consists of normalizing the quotes, the references and the bibliography, as well as checking that each and every quote has its correspondence in the bibliography and that the data are correct (coincidence of authors, years and books).

 

This way, you only have to take care of the contents and of telling us which rule you prefer that we use in our correction. Therefore, the text will fully comply with your interests and be perfect.

 

Quotation systems we normally work with:

(the examples of bibliographical references refer exclusively to books in these examples):

• Hispanic traditional quotation system:

The reference is introduced with a footnote:

BROWN, Alex, Autoedición: Texto y tipografía, Madrid, ACK Publish, 1991.

• Harvard o APA quotation system:

The reference is introduced in the main text with brackets (Brown, 1991: pág. 298) and afterwards in the bibliography all the books will be placed in alphabetical order:

 

Brown, A. (1991). Autoedición: Texto y tipografía, Madrid, España: ACK Publish. 

• Vancouver quotation system:

References must be numbered consecutively, with arabic numbers placed in brackets, in the order of appearance in the text (3). Afterwards, in the bibliography they will be numbered according to their order of appearance:

 

3. Jiménez Murillo L, Montero Pérez FJ. Compendio de Medicina de Urgencias: guía terapéutica. 2ª ed. Madrid: Elsevier; 2005.

• UNE norm:

ROTH, J.P. Essential guide to multifunction optical storage. Westport: Meckler, 1991.

 

Any other quoting system you prefer must be provided to us together with the document, so it can be applied by our staff.

Composing an academic text usually involves reading materials in different languages in order to make a previous research on the subject. However, sometimes this may lead to problems of style, such as for instance literal translations of some expressions, false friends, etc.

 

With style correction, we make sure that style and fluidity of the text are not affected by said mistakes. Moreover, changes will be suggested regarding the structure of the text or its expressions whenever they visibly hinder comprehension.

 

This kind of correction is normally carried out in electronic format (an MS Word document with the control change option on). This way, the client may, if he wishes to do so, accept or reject each suggested modification.