# Out of sight out of mind: the (in)visibility of corrections in bibliographic databases, repositories, and literature tools

Wytske Hepkema, Frédérique Bordignon, Willem Halfman

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## To cite this version:

Wytske Hepkema, Frédérique Bordignon, Willem Halfman. Out of sight out of mind: the (in)visibility of corrections in bibliographic databases, repositories, and literature tools. 18th EASE General Assembly and Conference, May 2025, Oslo, Norway, Norway. ScienceOpen, Editing in the age of misinformation. 10.14293/EASE.2025.031. hal-05265791

HAL Id: hal-05265791

https://enpc.hal.science/hal-05265791v1

Submitted on 17 Sep 2025

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# The (in)visibility of corrections in scientific literature databases and tools

Wytske M. Hepkema¹, Frédérique Bordignon²,³, Willem Halffman¹

1 Institute for Science in Society - Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; 2 Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Marne-la-Vallée, France; 3 LISIS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, Marne-la-Vallée, France

## Introduction

* When needed, scientific articles get corrected with a correction notice.

* Are readers of the scientific literature likely to see the correction notice when they find a scientific article?

* To test communication of corrections, we selected a corpus of papers with a non-trivial correction and checked these in various databases and literature tools.

## Methods

* Through Crossref we collected 120.146 papers corrected between 2020-25.

* We removed retracted papers and papers with an EoC.

* Selecting non-trivial corrections, we included only those with 2 or more PubPeer comments:

* **3.209 corrected papers.**

* For all databases and tools, we checked if they communicate corrections by checking 50 papers.

* For those that do communicate corrections, we checked all 3.209 papers manually or through the API.

## Acknowledgements

Funded by ERC NanoBubbles no. 951393.

We thank Boris Barbour for providing PubPeer data.

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European Research Council
Established by the European Commission

# 1) Most scientific literature databases and tools do not communicate corrections

Only Scite, PubMed and Scopus communicate corrections on the page of the corrected article

# 2) Those that do, do not communicate them for all articles

Scite 99,6%
PubMed 98%
Scopus 91%
Original source 95%

# 3) If they do, the communication is not always clear

## Do not communicate corrections

<table><tr><td>Databases</td><td>Web of Science<br>OpenAlex<br>Dimensions<br>Google Scholar<br>Lens</td></tr><tr><td>Reference softwares</td><td>Mendeley<br>Zotero<br>Endnote</td></tr><tr><td>Literature tools</td><td>SciSpace<br>Elicit</td></tr></table>

## What are the differences between publishers?

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## What do these correction warnings look like?

W.M. Hepkema, F. Bordignon, W. Halffman
Radboud University | view correction by SAGE

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Springer's way of communicating corrections

Referred to by Elsevier's way of communicating corrections

Erratum by Wolters Kluwers

## Discussion

* Communicating corrections to Crossref alone is not enough: there is work to be done on journal websites.

* Multiple corrections do not translate well to databases.

* The publishing world needs to improve the visibility of corrections on corrected papers.

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view correction statement by Taylor & Francis