Colleagues helping each other to publish in medical sciences: Iranian field specialists' convenience editing strategies.

This article reports a study into 60 research articles ( RAs) authored by Iranian medical researchers and published in high-quality international English journals. It investigated how academic professionals in medical sciences implement peer convenience editing ( CE) to improve articles and make them suitable for publication. The research identified nine editing interventions that were categorized as micro- or macro-editing strategies. The findings indicated that the most frequently used strategies are micro-strategies of substitution, addition, and mechanical alteration. The study also found that the abstract received the majority of editorial changes (mostly micro), followed by the introduction and then the discussion sections. The findings may help authors and institutions identify which sections and which types of editorial interventions are most likely to be required to ensure that RAs are optimized for publishing in international journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]