publication question

Summary:

thoughts a recent publication issue

publication question

Uncertain (guest) 17 Dec 2010 22:16

I am a 1st time marketeer in clinical psychology. I recently had an issue re: one of my 1st author publications that was, until a few days ago, in press. The problem is that upon its printing, an error (one that I made certain to bring to the copy-editor's attention in both annotation of the proofs and in the email response) was not corrected and printed. The error: the third author was moved to first, I to second, and second to third… clearly, I was taken aback by such an error and quite dismayed at the potential implications of this; not the least of which is SC's looking me up to find that what in my CV was a 1st author paper was now a 2nd. I have sent an email to the editor, but are there other things I should be doing? Implications I need to prepare for? Emails I should send to SCs? I am at a loss and certainly am reconsidering submitting papers to this journal in the future.

Re: publication question

vd 18 Dec 2010 02:50

Wow, I'm really sorry to hear that! You mentioned that you already e-mailed the editor, so hopefully they end up publishing a correction with the properly ordered author list. Once that is done, you should make some sort of indication on your CV (e.g., asterisk or footnote) to indicate that you are the first author of the article and that the original published version had an erroneous author list.

anon of course (guest) 18 Dec 2010 03:23

Maybe it would help if the suddenly fortunate third author would also protest the way things were put in print.

Anon Again (guest) 18 Dec 2010 14:03

I wouldn't worry about it too much at least from a SC perspective. I think the likelihood that they will look up your paper is pretty limited. They might request a copy and you can email it to them with the explanation about the order of authorship.

anonymous (guest) 18 Dec 2010 23:34

As for the search committees, I would not raise the issue unless they ask. In all likelihood they will not notice. Continue to provide the final version of the article as you submitted it with the authors in the correct order in your applications until the journal fixes the error.

As for the journal, don't let them get away with this mistake. Even if the article has gone to press, it is not too late to correct this error in the online HTML and PDF versions, which are what will matter for the majority of your readers. And, if you correct this soon enough, the paper will likely be indexed by Pubmed, Science Direct, etc. with the correct author order. For the smaller number of print readers, you could ask the journal to print a brief correction of the error in a future issue.

Could you tell us who the publisher is? Any publisher that failed to correct an error of this magnitude would certainly never get another submission from me. I'm astounded at the number of errors that are introduced to articles during copy editing, even by major publishers.