You’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating clear and comprehensive author guidelines, including models, examples, and instructions for formatting reference lists—but that doesn’t guarantee that every author will follow them. And even those that do are only human, and will inevitably make mistakes that it’s the copyeditor’s job to catch. But let’s be honest: wouldn’t you rather your copyeditors spent more time helping authors communicate more effectively and maintaining your high standards than they spend making sure there are (or aren’t) parentheses around all 75 publication dates in the bibliography?


And yet, all that time-consuming detail work in the references is just as necessary to producing a final product that you and your authors can both be proud of.


That’s where Edifix comes in! Using patented heuristics and “fuzzy matching” algorithms, Edifix can do in seconds the work that might take you hours to complete by hand, more intelligently than find-and-replace searches or typical macro-based tools:

  • Correct internal punctuation according to your chosen style
  • Correct order and presentation of elements according to your chosen style
  • Find and insert PMID links for journal articles indexed in PubMed
  • Find and insert DOI links for content deposited with Crossref
  • Correct mistyped journal titles (based on Edifix’s extensive and continually growing journal title database)
  • Correct and/or flag mistranscribed, incomplete, or missing author names, article titles, and volume, issue, and page numbers (based on PubMed and Crossref metadata)
  • Correctly abbreviate spelled-out journal titles—or spell out abbreviated ones—according to your chosen style
  • Flag articles that have been corrected or retracted since publication
  • Flag duplicate reference entries


Meanwhile, you or your copyeditors can be working on other aspects of the edit—so not only does Edifix perform repetitive, time-consuming reference edits more quickly than an editor can, it also allows editors to do two things at once. Probably the most effective multitasking you’ve ever done!