A science editor's wish list

One-sentence summary: This article presents an experience-based opinion on resources that would help author's editors working on scientific manuscripts perform their tasks more efficiently. Before I stumbled into a career in science editing, I had not fully appreciated how multi-layered the task of an author's editor can be; I had barely even known that such a profession existed. I began to enjoy the challenges each manuscript presented and was naturally thrilled to discover how many resources the editing fraternity already had at its disposal—handbooks for editors, websites on academic writing, awe-inspiring style manuals, and of course, Google Scholar, to name a few. All the learning and research my job required appealed to my academic nature, and I was beginning to make the fatal mistake of treating my profession as a purely intellectual pursuit. But I learnt how to stay focused and work within constraints, time being the most important one. Over several years of experience editing within constraints and mentoring others to do so, I have drawn up a wish list of additional resources and tools, which I would like to present here.  A dictionary of scientific abbreviations, with notes on pronunciation and usage How would someone who is not familiar with molecular biology easily determine whether MAP kinase should take an 'a' or 'an' before it, or verify if snRNPs is indeed pronounced 'snurps'?  A collocations dictionary for scientific terms This will spare the non–subject-matter-expert the trouble of having to scour textbooks or published papers just to find out if a protein is recruited to the cell membrane or on it, or if a patient 'presents symptoms' or 'presents with symptoms'.  A resource on writing styles of and errors made by authors from different countries I find that my reviews of trainee editors' work often carry annotations like how East Asian authors tend to overuse or incorrectly use transition phrases such as 'on the other hand', or use non-standard expressions like 'bilateral ears/eyes'. The results of online searches for such expressions can be misleading, because if they are common, an editor will be tempted to choose the safe option of leaving them untouched. Hence the need for some reliable reference that records experiences of editors working with geographically diverse authors.  A resource on peculiar field-specific usage and conventions that seem odd This will prevent most non–subject-matter-experts from rushing to edit expressions like 'overweight is a …