Author’s editor revisions to manuscripts published in international journals John Flowerdew, Simon Ho Wang* City University of Hong Kong, Department of English, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, PR China ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 30 June 2015 Received in revised form 23 March 2016 Accepted 29 March 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Writing for publication Proofreading Revision Scientific editing ABSTRACT English as Additional Language (EAL) scholarly writers have to overcome numerous obstacles to meet the expectations of editors and peer reviewers before they can publish their research articles in international journals published in English. A number of shapers (Burrough-Boenisch, 2003) are often involved in revising such articles before their eventual publication. This study focuses on the revision changes made by an author’s editor to a corpus of such articles leading up to their eventual publication. Based on textual analysis of the early drafts and published manuscripts of 15 SCI-indexed journal articles by Chinese doctoral students, a double-entry coding scheme was developed to describe 5160 revision changes made to the manuscripts, in terms of five types of revision, i.e., substitution, correction, addition, deletion, and rearrangement, and four different lexico-grammatical levels, i.e., morpheme, word, group and clause/clause complex. With the exception of correction, a category which applies to surface-level errors (which do not affect meaning), and is the second most frequent category of changes, all of the other categories represent changes which often substantially alter the meanings of the texts and which involve negotiation between the editor and the writer. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed with reference to previous studies focusing on revision changes and to debates concerning English as a Lingua Franca franca and World Englishes. ã 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction With English having established itself as the dominant language for international scholarly communication, English as an Additional Language (EAL) scholars are under enormous pressure to have their research articles published in SCI/SSCI- indexed international journals, the great majority of which are published in English. In order to meet the degree requirement, doctoral students studying science and engineering in major research universities in China (and increasingly in other jurisdictions), for example, are expected to publish at least one research article in an SCI-indexed journal (Li, 2005). It has been widely acknowledged that EAL scholars have to overcome considerable difficulties in order to publish their research in international journals (Canagarajah, 1996; Cho, 2004; Flowerdew, [63_TD$DIFF]1999; Salager-Meyer, 2008). Among other things, they may experience linguistic problems such as “less facility of expression,”“less rich vocabulary,” and “intervention from their first language” (Flowerdew, 1999[64_TD$DIFF]). Furthermore, it has been argued that such writers may have to negotiate with journal * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: enjohnf@cityu.edu.hk (J. Flowerdew), simon.wang@my.cityu.edu.hk (S.H. Wang). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2016.03.004 1060-3743/ ã 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Journal of Second Language Writing 32 (2016) 39–52 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Second Language Writing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/seclan