Every copyeditor knows the sinking feeling of staring down a long, long reference list—especially if the author hasn’t quite used the correct style. Let’s be honest, is your editing time (not to mention brainpower) better spent on helping authors communicate more effectively and maintaining your clients’ high standards, or on 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 client (whether publisher, journal editor, or author) can both be proud of.

That’s where Edifix comes in! Faster than your fingers, more powerful and accurate than find-and-replace or macros, Edifix uses patented heuristics and “fuzzy matching” algorithms to do in seconds the work that might take you hours to complete by hand:

• 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 can keep working on the rest of your edit—so not only does Edifix perform repetitive, time-consuming reference edits more quickly than you could do them yourself, it also allows you to do two things at once. Probably the most effective multitasking you’ve ever done!

Wondering how other freelance editors use Edifix? Learn more!