Proporción y distribución de erratas en publicaciones científicas

Abstract

Mistakes are part of the scientific process. Correction of these errors is done in specific articles called, among other names, erratum. The available investigation on errata has been done in very specific areas of research and journals. Therefore in this paper we study the rate of errata in the 27 areas defined by Scopus. We focused on the 2003-2017 period for a more detailed view of its characteristics. We analyze the distribution of the areas in quartiles of the percentage of errata. At the same time, we tested the errata trend of the 27 areas in the studied period. We found that errata are useful as a notable indicator to highlight differences across the areas of knowledge. With information from Web of Science we looked closely four areas of knowledge, focusing on the rate of errata per journal. We acknowledged most journals do not have published errata, the correlation between percentage of errata and impact factor is not significative and the distribution of the percentage of errata by journals in four areas is not normal with the best fit being a log-normal.