Corrections in the Chemical Literature: Their Number and Nature

Abstract

Corrections, errata, and corrigenda have played a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly journal record. Being cognizant of these corrections has always been a challenge for researchers and their management a bane to librarians. Identification of corrections has been made easier with the indexing of corrections by a few commercial databases and more recently by some publishers linking corrections to articles on their e-journal platforms. Few studies have examined the nature of these corrections, especially outside of the biomedical literature where article retraction has been the primary focus. This paper quantifies and qualifies the nature of corrections within the field of chemistry and compares the effectiveness of Scopus and Web of Science in locating corrections within scholarly journals. The study found that the correction rate averaged about 1.4 percent for the journals examined. While there were numerous types of corrections, chemical structures, omission of relevant references, and data errors were some of the most frequent types of published corrections.