Issue #87
by Michael Seadle (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Retraction Watch posted an article on “‘Stealth Corrections’: When Journals Quietly Fix Papers” by René Aquarius on 12 September 2024.¹ The article reported on: “... some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier.”¹ The publisher was informed, and “A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.” After Aquarius “... informed Elsevier, the journal’s publisher about the issue. In July, the journal issued a corrigendum for the paper.”¹ The fact that Elsevier reacted positively and quickly was good, but when he looked again, he wrote: “‘I don’t see any notification when looking at the landing site for the paper: no erratum, corrigendum or a simple log-entry that something has been changed’ … .”¹
It was not an isolated instance. “He and his fellow research-integrity sleuths, who police various issues in scholarly literature alongside their day jobs, found 130 more cases of what they dub stealth corrections, where journals fix papers without acknowledging that they have done so. They outline their findings in a paper published as a preprint on arXiv on September 10. … Of the 131 papers in the study sample, 76 were published by the Journal of the Balkan Union of Oncology. None has an associated digital object identifier but all have PubMed IDs.”¹
The fact of the corrections is good, but the failure to acknowledge the changes is potentially problematic. “Other corrections [are] being fixed quietly include paper titles, authors names, ethical disclosures, images, abstracts, affiliations, among others … .”¹ What seems like a trivial problem becomes more suspicious as the numbers grow. People who read the papers initially may not look at them again to discover the corrections without an explicit signal that important content had changed.
What the stealth corrections cover up is not only the authors’ error, but the fact that the problem slipped through the reviewing process. The pressure to get articles out as quickly as possible comes from many sources, not just the publisher, and it is up to the academic community to recognize that encouraging or enabling such haste is not in the interests of scientific reliability.
1: Retraction Watch (blog), “‘Stealth Corrections’: When Journals Quietly Fix Papers.” September 12, 2024. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/09/12/stealth-corrections-when-journals-quietly-fix-papers/.
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