Our ethical code

AJE is deeply committed to ethical practices in our business and throughout research. We uphold an ethical approach in the delivery of all our services. We refuse to engage in unethical practices because nothing is worth compromising our personal and professional integrity. As a company, we maintain policies and procedures related to unethical behavior, and we are dedicated to promoting ethics in research through education and information sharing.

English Language Editing

AJE will:

• Provide language editing focused on

1. Grammar
2. Spelling
3. Phrasing
4. Diction
5. Articles

• Comment upon inconsistencies
• Provide expertise in the field of study
• Provide suggestions for unclear sentences/grammar
• Add or remove spacing between words

AJE will not:

• Write or rewrite any portion of the paper
• Perform content review
• Identify or address plagiarism
• Interpret data
• Organize the paper
• Deliberately reduce or increase the overall word count
• Perform journal-specific copy editing (e.g., enforcing serial commas, editing according to AMA style, editing according to in-house journal style)
• Interpret data or draw conclusions
• Submit papers on your behalf
• Become an author on the paper
• Edit data, variables or numbers, references, or author affiliations

Companies that write or rewrite papers without full transparency about their role are acting unethically. Using this type of unethical service could lead to paper retraction and other risks to your reputation.

You do not need to include your AJE editors as authors on your paper. Because our editors perform only English language editing, and not content editing or other tasks that merit authorship, they do not qualify for authorship status according to the guidelines outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). However, you are welcome to acknowledge AJE’s editing assistance in the acknowledgements section of your paper.

Translation Services

AJE will:

• Maintain the author’s meaning 
• Review field-specific terms and phrasing for accuracy and consistency
• Ensure that the meaning is clear
• Edit the manuscript focusing on grammar, phrasing, and readability
• Comment on unclear sentences or terms

AJE will not:

• Write any portion of the paper
• Add or remove content
• Perform content review
• Identify or address plagiarism
• Interpret data
• Reorganize the paper
• Deliberately reduce or increase the overall word count
• Interpret data or draw conclusions
• Submit papers on your behalf
• Become an author on the paper
• Accept manuscripts in draft form
• Perform copy editing to apply journal-specific requirements

Figures and Illustration Services

AJE will:

• Ensure figures comply with journal guidelines by changing:

1. File type
2. Resolution
3. Color space
4. Font
5. Scale
6. Line weights
7. Layout

• Work with authors to create original artwork and short animations based on the data or model in the paper

AJE will not:

• Change brightness, contrast, or color balance
• Crop images
• Vectorize a plot or graph unless we are confident that we can do it with extremely high fidelity
• Vectorize any primary data, such as spectra or other direct output from laboratory equipment
• Increase the resolution of pictures/photos

Formatting

AJE will:

• Format your manuscript’s layout, citations, and references in accordance with journal guidelines
• Reorder your citations and references as needed
• Fix incorrect information in references based on information in published databases
• Alert you to references that are not cited within the text or citations that do not occur in the reference list

AJE will not:

• Add missing references or citations
• Format an ambiguous reference
• Complete documents such as authorship forms, conflict of interest forms, or CONSORT/PRISMA forms