Abstract

Like it or not, errors occur throughout scholarly publishing. Some creep in, while others leap in. Some are utterly inconsequential, whereas others are foundational. Some result from the Rush to Pronounce, while others betray insufficient searches for, or misuse of, evidence. It falls to the academy to correct as many of these as possible, but there is a palpable reluctance to be bothered, as though correcting error were a second-rate activity. As a result, errors either go uncorrected or are corrected in conditions of lower visibility. In this article, the author discusses a few such examples and brings to bear some quantitative data to support the conclusion that, once insinuated into the public domain, errors continue to live on far more frequently than is desirable.

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