The (in)visibility of corrections in scientific literature databases and tools – Feedback for the EASE conference
Hi, this post is written by me: Wytske Hepkema, one of the PhD candidates in NanoBubbles. This post it to share something about my experiences at EASE’s conference: editing in the age of misinformation. EASE is an association for science editors, so the conference was mostly attended by scientific editors, and other involved in publishing, such as representatives of publishers, librarians, research integrity officers, and many companies providing services to publishers. So why would I, a PhD candidate studying error correction in science, including the role of scholarly publishing, attend this conference?
Well the reason to attend this conference was dual. First, to learn more about the publishing world directly from editors, publishers, and companies, and second, to get feedback on our work from different angle than we would usually get. Hereby some of the things I’ve learned about the publishing industry from this conference. First, as expected the language used at this conference is very different from panels I’ve attended before. Phrases such as reviewer loyalty, workflows, and effectiveness were used a lot, indicating the focus on the business side of journals, rather than the knowledge production side of it. This was further emphasized by that many of the speakers had to state a conflict of interest beforehand, and the large number of sponsored talks (coming from a field that typically has no sponsors for conferences).
It was nice to learn that despite this commercial aspect, there seems to be a collaborative community. Many of the EASE members know each other well and were very happy to see each other again. They also kindly welcomed me into many conversations and showed interest in our research. Especially in a panel about research integrity checks, I learned how much more publishers started to work together when they realized they were all struggling with paper mills. Many publishers can now share submitted articles through STM integrity hub to check for duplicate submissions, and they have a shared list of “red-flagged-authors”.

I presented an ongoing study of Frédérique Bordignon, Willem Halffman, and me in which we look at the visibility of corrections across various platforms through a poster. Because, researchers use the literature to build on for their own research, it is important to be aware of significant corrections to published works. So how likely is it that researchers will see the correction when they read a corrected paper? We looked at a set of over 3.000 corrected papers on various platforms if there was something to notify the reader that this paper has a correction. We are still working on it, but hereby some preliminary results. We found that the majority of databases and reference software does not warn for corrections. Only PubMed, Scopus, Scite and the journal’s webpage do. They do so for nearly all articles in our corpus (but miss a few), when they do, the communication is not always clear.
Several people showed interest in our study, and asked interesting questions which we can use to improve the study. Such as, are the articles that are not clearly labelled in databases perhaps caused by a delay? We will check the dates of the corrections and find out more. Besides getting feedback, I felt like I may have contributed to some more awareness about the importance of clear labelling of corrections. One of the research integrity officers of a publisher said they will take up on articles that weren’t labelled clearly as corrected, and someone from a database said they will talk internally about improving the labelling in case of multiple corrections.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Frédérique Bordignon (May 26, 2025). The (in)visibility of corrections in scientific literature databases and tools – Feedback for the EASE conference. NanoBubbles . Retrieved December 13, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/140j9

