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Published as doi: 10.1096/fj.09-130922.
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(The FASEB Journal. 2009;23:2345-2348.)
© 2009 FASEB

Does it mean anything if your own name is wrong in your published paper?

Thomas A. Trikalinos1

Center for Clinical Evidence Synthesis, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

1 Correspondence: Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center, 800 Washington St., Box 63, Boston, MA 02111, USA. E-mail: ttrikalin{at}mac.com or ttrikalinos{at}tuftsmedicalcenter.org

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. —Trikalinos, T. A. Does it mean anything if your own name is wrong in your published paper?


Key Words: errors • errata • galley proofs • sloppiness


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