Edit, and edit again and again and again and....

I find it interesting how many times one can read an article and still find errors.

I started my Learn Where You Live project back in December 2011.  It is now June 2013 and I have just finished reviewing the copy edit for my soon to be published article.  Before being submitted to a journal, it went through numerous drafts which were edited by various individuals.  The article was submitted to two different journals and comments were made by 5 peer-reviewers.  Then the copy editor reviewed the paper finding 6 additional errors.  I went through it again, and then again and found another 14.

Some of my biggest problems were:

• Capitalization
• For example: university in a general sense, University when referring to a specific place
• References
• Two articles that I noted in my reference list were never cited in my paper.  According to APA style guidelines, they should be removed from my reference list.
• I had a missing volume number on one reference
• I had inconsistently spelled an author's last name and represented the date incorrectly once within the body of the article

When I was a student at the University of Saskatchewan way back when, my biggest problem was usually the reference list.  It is somewhat comforting to see that nothing has really changed on that front!

I am left wondering what other errors remain, soon to be discovered by the world of academia!