Why Correcting the Literature with Errata and Retractions is Good Medical Practice?

Excerpt

The National Library of Medicine, USA (NLM) has a long-standing tradition of providing access to information in the biomedical literature [1]. One of the ways NLM assists users is to add subsequent notices of and/or linkages between citations for errata, retractions, partial retractions, corrected and republished articles, duplicate publications, comments (including author replies and expressions of concern), updated versions of articles, patient summaries, and republished (reprinted) articles indexed and available in NLM’s online MEDLINE database. Users who search MEDLINE will be informed if they retrieved a citation for an article that has been corrected by an erratum notice, retracted or partially retracted, corrected and republished; been found to duplicate another article; generated a separately published commenting article; been updated by a subsequent article; and if a summary for patients has been published, or has been republished (reprinted) in another journal. …