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Errors in Anaesthesia

It is well known that a slight error in a test, an experiment or a calculation can render the results invalid. Likewise, an error in a publication can lead to misleading information. These errors can range from typographical, formatting or printing errors, which are obvious and are of little clinical significance in the majority of occasions. Some errors can lead to not particularly wrong, but confusing or misleading clinical information. Most journals, including Anaesthesia, insert a correct version in a succeeding journal issue as an erratum. If one were to rely on just the original article without referring to the erratum subsequently reported, it is possible to get the wrong clinical message. We came across one such erratum [1] which had the potential to change the message in the original article [2]. We searched, therefore, all the issues of Anaesthesia from 1996 to 2006 and found 37 errata published. These included omissions, spelling mistakes, printing mistakes, typing errors, and wrongly cited references, etc. Perhaps one should not be surprised that a small error can lead to a markedly different message, and journals rightly insert the correct version in a subsequent issue. What is interesting to note is that there is no way of connecting the original article with the subsequently published correction, even using the Blackwell Synergy online service. When manually searching for the errata, we found that where and how they are inserted varies from journal to journal. In Anaesthesia these are generally printed on the last page of an issue, although this is not consistent. Furthermore, when reading an issue of a journal, if a reader comes across an erratum we wonder how many would relate this to the original article and see if it changes the conclusion. The article cited above [2] is one of the 20 most read articles in the last 12 months. Yet, on the contents page there is no indication of the erratum published in a later issue of the journal, which has the potential to change the clinical message. It is only when the full text link is followed that one will see at the end that the article is cited by another article. One would think that with recent advances in computing technology it would be possible to provide a link to the erratum alongside the original article.