4

A paper A has been published recently with a big publisher. The article is available as early access, but it is still in press, i.e. not yet assigned to a volume. In that paper, our paper B was cited, however, the reference in text and in the reference list is written completely wrong - to the point that other researchers would have a hard time finding B, or understanding who wrote B.

I contacted the authors of A, without getting a response. Is it appropriate to contact the editor of the journal that published A, and ask him/her to correct the mistake? What other action should be taken, if any?

Mark
  • 6,362
  • 20
  • 36
  • 1
    Most journals automatically add doi links at least to recent references, and then take the opportunity to automatically compare to a database. The typesetters then send you nice comments in the galleys that you should check this or that reference because it's ambiguous. I thought that was standard today ... – Karl Jan 31 '18 at 22:42

1 Answers1

6

Definitely yes. It's in your best business to have your work cited properly so that it can be disseminated in the community, and the editor's/publisher's responsibility is to provide texts of highest possible quality. Even if they say (some journals indeed do this) that they are not responsible for authors' mistakes, it's a situation where the journal might gain a reputation of one that doesn't care about the quality of its content (so people won't take the research published there seriously), makes poor editting and is sloppy. That's exactly what I thought when trying to find a cited paper with completely messed up metrics (and couldn't, eventually; also the authors didn't respond to my e-mails). So in fact the editor should be grateful for pointing out such a mistake as you're partly doing their job - and for free, even!