ABSTRACT
Academic editing is a major area of work for members of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), the professional membership association for Australian and New Zealand editors, with over 1400 members. The ethics of editing student work, including theses, is an ongoing issue for professional editors. This chapter examines the guidelines for editing research theses developed by IPEd to provide guidance to members and to students and their supervisors. The chapter discusses the development of the guidelines from the first version in 2001 to the most recent revision released in 2019. The origin of and process for the recent revision are explained, including the establishment of IPEd’s Standing Committee on Academic Editing in 2017. The relationship of the IPEd guidelines to other material is reviewed, including the guidelines of individual universities in Australia and New Zealand, the Australian Government’s anti-cheating services legislation passed in 2020, and IPEd’s Australian Standards for Editing Practice and its Code of Ethics for members. Ongoing challenges in providing guidance on thesis editing in the Australian context are also discussed, including the increasing use of the thesis-by-publication format, the language diversity of research students and their supervisors, and changing research and academic work environments.
