Saturday 4 June 2016

cv - How does an Erratum on one's own paper affect one's career as a researcher?


I'm still early in my scientific career, with only a few papers published. However, I've discovered a typo in a non-critical equation of my paper, and one of the graphs in the same paper should have smaller values (but exactly the same trend). It's important to say that it does not change any of the conclusions drawn in the paper. I've requested to issue an erratum to fix these errors.


At the moment, I am feeling extremely stressed and saddened thinking about how bad this erratum would reflect on my CV and in my integrity as a researcher... I would like to hear some opinions of people who have been through this process... Did you notice editors becoming more harsh on accepting other works from you because of a past mistake? Was it possible to still get grants and partnerships in projects even if you have a 'flawed' record?



Answer



It will not affect you career. You'll be fine.


An erratum is not a bad thing, per se. Errors happen, and if you fix them it's fine. The error you describe are totally normal and I would even guess that a large fraction of published paper contains this type of error and does not have an erratum.


Even a more serious error that invalidates some of your finding will not necessarily have any impact on your career (but in this case you should write an erratum!). A retraction would be more serious, because retraction are associated with misconduct.


Another point is, that most people will not even notice that there is as erratum for one of your papers.


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