A bibliometric study on the publication errors in emergency medicine journals from 2000 to 2020

The literature on scientific publication errors in medical research is limited, and no studies on emergency medicine publications have been conducted yet. This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of the publication errors in emergency medicine literature.

This bibliometric study reviewed intervened publication errors in the manuscripts of seven high-impact emergency medicine journals from 2000 to 2020, covering twenty years, and evaluated the corrections in the forms of an erratum, corrigendum, addendum, and retracted papers. The detected publication error rate and the trend, error severity, and error types were calculated.

We detected 257 intervened scientific papers consisting of 251 corrections due to one or more publication errors and six retractions. Authors were the primary source of the errors (93.2%). Most of the errors were in the author attribution section (40.5%). The published errors of 7.2% had an impact on the paper's conclusion. Simple typographic errors were the most common error type (62.5%). The corrected publication error rate was 1.3%, with a steady trend over the twenty years.

Publications errors are inevitable, but it is possible to minimize them. The number of corrections in emergency medicine literature is at a low rate and show many similarities with the previous literature.