Text Shapers in English for Research Publication Purposes: An Overview of Their Practices and Services

Publishing research in English poses linguistic challenges for non-native English speaker scholars (NNSS). To prepare their manuscripts for submission, peer review, and post-acceptance stages, they may receive linguistic assistance and editing from different individuals, such as field specialists or EFL / ESL teachers, collectively called text-shapers. To the best of our knowledge, there is no recent comprehensive portrayal of text-shaping practices in the literature on English for research publication purposes (ERPP). This overview introduces the text-shaping community’s practices by reviewing the most significant and relevant studies on this realm in the leading journals on ESP / EAP and ERPP. We used the Web of Science database to make the review as inclusive as possible. Several search terms were used to compile the mainstream literature on the topic, including text shaper, literacy broker, language editor, author’s editor, convenience editor, editor, and copy editor. In this thematic review, we describe text-shapers’ editing practices and strategies, outline their characteristics and techniques in providing linguistic services to NNES authors, and highlight the benefits and challenges text-shapers experience in the scholarly publishing industry. Moreover, text-shaping services in Asia, with mounting demand for publication in English, were examined explicitly along with other contexts to comprehensively depict its status quo geographically. As EFL teachers are one of the most active agents in delivering text-shaping services to the NNES authors, especially in contexts like Iran, this review could help the EFL community in Iran and similar contexts to get familiar with the bigger picture of text shaping and its dimensions.