Are copyeditors responsible for fact-checking?

Copyeditors are usually expected to carry out some degree of fact-checking. But clients rarely state which facts should be checked or how thoroughly. To avoid delays, budget quibbles and missed errors, always establish clear fact-checking expectations with your client.

Fact-checking is an established part of copyediting. But, after more than 15 years as a freelance editor, my own fingers would probably be sufficient to count the number of briefs I’ve received that have explicitly mentioned the topic. Data from other editors supports my experience: almost 90% of copyeditors and proofreaders report that fact-checking is mentioned in a quarter or fewer of their clients’ briefs (I’ll explore this data further below).

Clients and editors may believe they have a shared understanding of what should be checked. But the reality is often more complex, built on a shaky foundation of precedent, assumptions, gut instincts and unspoken rules.

This is vitally important, because those gaps in understanding can leave spaces for major mistakes to appear in the final text – at best marring readers’ experience and at worst having serious legal and financial implications.

What is fact-checking in editorial work and why is it important?

In editorial work, fact-checking is the process of ensuring the information in a text is truthful.

Reasons to carry out fact-checking include:

• To ensure accuracy – especially given the advent of generative AI and its tendency to hallucinate
• To promote the credibility, integrity and trustworthiness of the publication
• To uphold ethical standards
• To avoid spreading misinformation
• To mitigate or remove legal risk
• To protect the author’s and publisher’s brands and reputations

Who carries out fact-checking?

Copyeditors may be expected to check facts, but they are not responsible for doing so by default. Here’s what The Chicago Manual of Style has to say:

In book publishing, the author is finally responsible for the accuracy of a work; most book publishers do not perform fact-checking in any systematic way or expect it of their manuscript editors unless specifically agreed upon up front. Nonetheless, obvious errors, … should always be pointed out to the author, and questionable proper names, bibliographic references, and the like should be checked and any apparent irregularities queried.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, §2.62

But what is an ‘apparent irregularity’ and what might ‘the like’ consist of? Here we get to that shaky foundation I alluded to above. As Chicago’s guidance suggests, copyeditors must often use their discretion to decide which facts they should check.

(For a deep-dive into fact-checking, see Brooke Borrel’s The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, which I discovered as I was researching this article and now have on my shelves. Although it’s primarily focused on journalism, my initial impression is that it contains many helpful principles that can be transferred to other types of publication.)

Which facts can copyeditors check?

At the basic level, copyeditors might be expected to check:

• Names (spellings)
• Dates
• Geography (spellings, distances, directions, etc)
• Calculations
• Data (e.g. publication year) about widely accessible publications

Higher-level fact-checking responsibilities – potentially requiring specialist expertise or resources – might include:

• Relationships between people (e.g. in a history book)
• Statistics
• Scientific facts
• Claims about individuals or events
• Quotation accuracy (I’ve written elsewhere about this topic, including what to do when you don’t know a quotation’s source)
• Data (e.g. publication year) about more niche or historical publications

Remember that both lists are only examples: the array of facts you might need to check is as vast as the number of topics that people and organizations write about.

It’s also vital to understand that, as a copyeditor, you don’t necessarily even need to check the basic facts by default (although in practice most editors do). Clients and copyeditors need to agree the scope of any fact-checking that is required. Let’s look at this in more detail.

How do I find out if my client expects fact-checking?

Ideally, the client’s copyediting brief will clearly set out exactly which facts you’re expected to check and to what level of detail and rigour. However, when I asked editors and proofreaders on LinkedIn, 88% of the 91 who replied said that only a quarter or fewer of their clients’ briefs mention fact-checking.

(Do take a look at the comments below the poll; there are some great questions, answers and observations from editors – with a variety of backgrounds and levels of experience – that we can all learn from.)

So, if the client doesn’t communicate their fact-checking requirements up front, what should you do?

Start by asking the client. Just because they haven’t mentioned fact-checking doesn’t mean they don’t require it. They may simply consider it to be such an integral part of copyediting that it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

Other clues that can help you to determine the required level of fact-checking might come from:

• Knowledge of the client’s expectations and common issues in their projects (if you’ve worked with them before)
• Your own instincts and experience (these will likely become more accurate as you gain experience)
• The fee (a lower fee is likely to come with lower expectations around fact-checking – at least in theory!)

It’s important to establish with the client what fact-checking they expect. Ideally you should do this before the project starts. However, as the project progresses, it can be helpful to share specific examples from the manuscript to confirm your understanding of the client’s expectations.

Fact-checking and contracts

It’s a good idea to mention fact-checking in your terms and conditions, contract or project proposal, especially if the client isn’t very familiar with commonly established standards in publishing or editorial work.

If the client sends you a contract to sign, check it carefully for clauses that require you to guarantee an unrealistic level of accuracy or even indemnify the client against errors.

When should I raise an author query instead of checking a fact myself?

One area where copyeditors may particularly doubt themselves is when to check a fact themselves and when to raise an author query. Especially if you’re unfamiliar with the client or author, it can be difficult to be certain where to draw the line between ‘this is quick and simple enough to look it up myself’ and ‘this will take too much of my time to check’ or ‘the author will want to check this themselves’ or I’m not sure I can check this reliably’.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that standards have changed over time. What would once have required a trip to a library now often takes mere seconds of searching online. In such cases, raising an author query is likely to take far more time than it’s worth (and risk annoying the author).

A rule of thumb: when to raise a query and when to check a fact yourself

The topic of when to raise an author query came up at a recent meeting of my Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading local group. The consensus was that, assuming you feel competent to check a fact yourself, you should probably do so if it would take you less than a couple of minutes.

Otherwise, once you’ve (1) phrased your query, (2) proofread it, (3) sent it to the author for them to answer and (4) spent time incorporating their reply (potentially having to spend extra time reminding yourself of the context), you’ll have used up far more time than the two minutes you could have spent looking up the answer yourself.

However, there are some caveats to the above:

• Use Track Changes (and potentially a brief explanatory note) so the author can check any factual changes you make. And be extra-cautious about changing facts if the author won’t have a chance to review your changes before publication.
• If you’ve been engaged as a fact-checker (i.e. where this is the whole job, with no other editorial tasks), you’re likely to spend longer before raising a query.
• If you’re training to be an editor, you might find your tutors expect you to raise queries even for what you consider to be very simple matters. Although this doesn’t necessarily reflect how you will work in the real world, it can be useful while you’re training to keep a clear mental barrier between your remit and the author’s. Once you’ve qualified, you can start to be more flexible according to your real-world clients’ expectations.

Should I fact-check references?

The short answer to this question is almost always, on the face of it, no.

If a client specifically wants you to check that a reference list is factually correct (as opposed to correctly styled), they will usually say so explicitly.

But the reality of what you should actually check is rather more murky.

When you’re copyediting a list of references, you will almost always end up checking some facts as part of your work. For example:

• You encounter the author name ‘Smyith’. Just like you would when editing the main text, you check the spelling.
• You find the words ‘organize’ and ‘synthesise’ in the title of a journal article. Again, just like you would check a book title or quote in the main text, you check whether the mixed spelling styles (ize/ise) are present in the original work.
• The publisher’s name is missing from a reference. You look it up, and in the process you spot that the year of publication is incorrect, so you address that too.
• The name of an article’s author is spelled differently in the body text and the reference list. You look it up and spot that the article has a coauthor who isn’t mentioned in the manuscript you’re editing, so you add the missing name.
• You click on a URL to check it’s valid and notice that the content at the URL doesn’t match what’s given in your reference list. You query your author to establish the correct details to include.

Unless you’ve explicitly been briefed not to check any facts or you’re working on a shoestring budget, it’s standard to correct these kinds of issues – up to a point. But where that point falls is open to interpretation and varies between contexts. Let’s take a look at this question in the next section.

What if the fact-checking reveals more errors than I expected?

At some point you’ll have a project where the errors are more widespread than you expected – or where you feel the budget doesn’t cover the work needed to address them.

When this happens, it’s important to address the matter promptly, for reasons that affect both you and the client. For example:

• Cost: checking the extra facts will take extra time, meaning you may need to renegotiate the fee with your client to avoid your hourly rate dropping to a level you find unacceptable
• Schedule: this extra time could affect when you can return the project to your client
• Quality: the factual errors may have quality-control implications the client wishes to investigate before you go further
• Legal: there may be legal implications you’re unaware of (the issue most likely to crop up in relation to fact-checking is plagiarism, which I’ve written about elsewhere – for example, if your author has deliberately or unwittingly used others’ published work inappropriately and introduced errors in doing so)
• Impact on others: the author may need to plan to set aside extra time to look into the issues you’re finding

When I start to suspect a manuscript’s facts are a bit squiffy, I generally tell my client straight away. I let them know I’m monitoring the situation and ask if they have any initial comments (this is their cue to say, ‘Oh, yes, we thought that manuscript might be chock full of errors. Sorry, didn’t we say?!’ Or perhaps something a little more helpful…). This forewarns the client, so they won’t be caught off guard if my fears are confirmed.

Later, once I feel I have an accurate picture of the manuscript, I’ll get in touch again. Hopefully I will simply be able to say ‘false alarm!’ and put the client’s mind at rest. But, if not, I’ll suggest options for dealing with the issues I’ve identified.

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Although copyeditors are not responsible for fact-checking by default, in practice clients will generally expect it to some degree. So, if a client doesn’t clearly set out their fact-checking requirements, find out what they expect – especially if you have grounds to suspect the facts in a manuscript aren’t quite as factual as they should be.

What seems like a simple principle – that a published text should be free from errors – can be a minefield of miscommunication and misunderstandings. Address potential factual errors early and well, to protect the accuracy and credibility of the final text.