What Happens When Nobody Proofreads an Academic Paper

An anonymous reader writes: Drafts are drafts for a reason. Not only do they tend to contain unpolished writing and unfinished thoughts, they're often filled with little notes we leave ourselves to fill in later. Slate reports on a paper recently published in the journal Ethology that contained an unfortunate self-note that made it into the final, published article, despite layers upon layers of editing, peer review, and proofreading. In the middle of a sentence about shoaling preferences, the note asks, "should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?" When notified of the mistake, the publisher quickly took it down and said they would "investigate" how the line wasn't caught. One of the authors said it wasn't intentional and apologized for the impolite error.

Comments

MS Office Incompatibility

[nowsharing]

I'm going to make a guess here. No academic would leave that line right in the middle of their paper, and there is no way that the fire-breathing peer reviewers would let it slip. It was probably a comment left in one version of the document that was incorrectly transferred into the text of the final copy. When you have a million versions of closed-source MS Office files floating around, this shit happens. Another reason to use open formats.