Major bibliographic errors in PubMed: personal experience among 240 publications and proposed remediation process for errors

Although substantial data exist on errors in bibliographic citations in journal articles [1], literature review reveals no data on errors in bibliographic citations in PubMed. Yet bibliographic errors in PubMed are much more important than errors in individual journals. PubMed is a ubiquitous literature search engine. Errors in PubMed could render articles inaccessible to researchers or clinicians performing computerized literature searches.

Despite major contributions to academic medicine, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), like any human institution, is subject to errors, including errors in PubMed. Major errors are herein defined as incorrectly spelling authors' names, deleting authors' names, making mistakes in keywords in article titles, or making mistakes in journal volume, issue, or page numbers. Review of my 240 articles cited in PubMed, 1982–2015, revealed 3 major errors (1.25% rate). The 3 errors comprised misspelling of surnames of authors in 2 cases and deletion of all authors in 1 case [2, 3].

When called about this last error, the PubMed representative said the error was in a reference listed as “in process” and would be corrected during a systematic reference verification. The verified (corrected) reference would then be listed without the “in process” designation. However, this reference verification process can require considerable time. One reference for an article I coauthored was still not verified more than one year after the initial listing of the publication [4].

The following suggestions may be useful. First, PubMed should warn during every literature search that references listed as “PubMed—in process” are preliminary and subject to errors. Second, if contacted about an error, PubMed should expeditiously mark this reference as “reference accuracy is contested”. Third, PubMed should commit to correcting any error less than four weeks after notification.