title: Does it mean anything if your own name is wrong in your published paper?
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center, 800 Washington St., Box 63, Boston, MA 02111, USA. ttrikalin@mac.com
authors.forename: Thomas A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Trikalinos
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D009275:Names; D011643:Publishing