Trikalinos Thomas A
Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center, 800 Washington St., Box 63, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
FASEB J. 2009 Aug;23(8):2345-8. doi: 10.1096/fj.09-130922. Epub 2009 Mar 16.
Journals instruct authors to proofread their accepted manuscripts before signing them off for publication and expect them to submit errata to correct any mistakes identified thereafter. Herein, I examine papers with obvious errors in the author name list. I queried PubMed for papers under common Greek forenames looking for citations where author surnames and forenames are swapped. I identified 113 such papers from 101 journals. Author names are corrected with errata only in 20, after a median of 6.5 mo. Time to name correction is shorter for journals with impact factor above the median (P=0.015). To further explore this suggested association of apparent author sloppiness with journal impact, I use as controls all errata published between 1996 and 2008 in 5 top-cited general medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and British Medical Journal); 3.4% of the latter contain name corrections (vs. 18.1% of all errata in the 101 journals during the same period, P<10(-6)). Egregious errors may be markers of cursory if any proofreading and, therefore, markers for additional unidentified inaccuracies. In addition, I wonder whether authors may be as reluctant to rectify other, nonobvious (yet potentially consequential) mistakes after a paper's publication.
期刊要求作者在提交已接受的稿件以供发表前进行校对,并期望他们提交勘误表以纠正此后发现的任何错误。在此,我检查了作者姓名列表中存在明显错误的论文。我在PubMed中查询了以常见希腊名字命名的论文,以查找作者姓氏和名字互换的引用情况。我从101种期刊中识别出了113篇此类论文。只有20篇论文在中位数为6.5个月后用勘误表纠正了作者姓名。影响因子高于中位数的期刊,其姓名纠正时间更短(P = 0.015)。为了进一步探讨这种明显的作者粗心与期刊影响力之间的潜在关联,我将1996年至2008年期间在5种被引用次数最多的综合医学期刊(《新英格兰医学杂志》《美国医学会杂志》《柳叶刀》《内科学年鉴》和《英国医学杂志》)上发表的所有勘误表作为对照;其中3.4%包含姓名更正(同期101种期刊所有勘误表中的这一比例为18.1%,P < 10⁻⁶)。严重错误可能标志着校对工作敷衍了事,因此也可能是存在其他未被发现的不准确之处的标志。此外,我想知道作者在论文发表后是否也同样不愿意纠正其他不明显(但可能产生重要影响)的错误。