Patterns of manuscript revisions

Abstract

Revisions made by authors to their own manuscripts were studied in order to derive general principles of editing behavior and factors that might be useful in the design of text editors. Among the dependent variables were the amount of material in each edit and the frequency of different classes of edits. Edits of single words were found to be especially common and the most frequent class of edit was changes. Furthermore, edits were not randomly distributed throughout the papers but tended to be clustered.