Context: Say author A writes: "the authors B in Ref [30] found two consequences of the standing posture i.e sitting in the workplace on the health of industrial workers".

Actually, it should be "the authors B in Ref [30] found two consequences of the standing posture i.e not sitting in the workplace on the health of industrial workers".

From the original reference i.e [30], the authors B have implied the latter i.e "not sitting" and A didn't include "not..." mistakenly.

Also, it is well known that standing posture does not imply sitting. A has made and detected the error in his published survey paper and its a mistake on his part.

Should this error be overlooked? or Does it require an Errata or Corrigendum?

Note that this error does not in anyway affect the conclusions, deductions and contributions made in A's paper. It is just a portion where he/she reported from literature. Also, the mistake can be verified by everyone who checks back at the original reference.

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    This is clearly a typo, as "standing posture i.e. sitting" is clearly contradictory. If there were an error that affected the likely understanding of the article, an erratum / corrigendum / whatever would be in order, but I don't imagine most people would bother with this. – Flyto Oct 25 '18 at 9:55

I suggest that you write to the Journal to point out this error. It is, after all, still an error and needs to be corrected.

If someone were to write to us describing such an error, one of our editors would confirm the validity of the claim. If upheld, then this will result in a small correction (perhaps one to two lines) to be printed in the next issue of the journal. This is the practice at least in the journals in health and medicine that I help edit.

In the electronic versions of the manuscript, we would make the change in-house and release a new version of the paper with a notation at the end of the article specifying the change. That way, no new versions would be released with the error still in place.

We would issue an apology, too, and a statement that the inferences and conclusions were not affected.

This error would not be significant enough to alert indexing services. Also, this would not trigger a need for us to investigate the source of the error or to review our processes.


It's a very small error and clearly just a typo, so don't worry too much. Probably best to notify the Journal as they might have an opportunity to change it, but if they don't I think anyone reading it would thing "wait that doesn't make sense or fit with the rest of the paper. Oh, they must have missed out the word 'not'." and then carry on reading.

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