No Bad Publicity: The Bibliometric Advantage of Corrected Articles in PLOS ONE

Abstract

Corrections to published books and articles help maintain the accuracy and reliability of the scholarly record. Little research, if any, has explored their impact except in assessing their effectiveness at preventing the propagation of error. This study was undertaken to examine the relationship between having a correction published and the number of times corrected articles are cited and viewed. Using a sample of research articles published between September 2007 and November 2011 in PLOS ONE, this bibliometric analysis compared journal articles that had been corrected (n = 564) to uncorrected controls (n = 564). Corrected articles (M = 6733) were viewed on the PLOS site about 26 percent more frequently than articles in the control group (M = 5324). Corrected articles (M = 48.8) were also cited about 25 percent more frequently than controls (M = 38.9). Corrections most frequently addressed errors in the articles’ authorship statements. The number, timing, and category of the corrections showed little relationship to the number of views and citations that the corrected articles received.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.