Managing pulmonary embolism

The BMJ long ago gave up checking every reference that is supplied. We do, however, expect full details and are alert to any “suspicious looking” element in a reference. Some errors, of course, are difficult to spot. In this editorial by Karin Janata (21 June, pp 1341-2), the technical editor and proofreader could not have known that the page numbers in reference 2 were wrong because they did not look particularly odd. The British Thoracic Society's guidelines for management of suspected acute pulmonary embolism are indeed published in volume 58 of Thorax (2003), but they appear on pages 470-83 [not 1-14].