Ask EveryONE: Corrections

My paper was recently published in PLOS ONE, but I’ve noticed an error. Can it be corrected?

PLOS ONE corrects major errors found in published articles via the addition of a Formal Correction to the paper. Formal Corrections are reserved for errors that significantly affect the understanding or utility of the paper.  In addition to being published on the PLOS ONE website, corrections are also indexed in PubMed Central and PubMed.

When a paper has been corrected, a correction notice will appear in a gray box at the top of the article page.  A CrossMark logo now appears on every PLOS article page and in the downloadable PDF; clicking the logo on a corrected article’s page will bring up a status box showing that the paper has been corrected.

To see the full correction, click the “View correction” link in the gray box.  This will direct you to a page with the full correction details, including any updated figures, tables, or supporting information, along with a PDF version of the correction notice available for download.  An example of a correction notice on the original article is shown below.

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Example of a Formal Correction notice (click to enlarge)

If you notice an error in your published paper, you should contact our corrections team at corrections@plos.org.  Please include the title and DOI of your paper; a description of the problem; and any corrected figures, tables, or supporting information files. PLOS staff will decide whether a Formal Correction is appropriate and will work with you to publish a correction as quickly as possible.

If there is an error in one of your figures, tables, or supporting information files, the corrected items will be included in the Formal Correction. An example of a Formal Correction is shown below.

corrections image2Example of a Formal Correction (click to enlarge)

The post Ask EveryONE: Corrections appeared first on EveryONE.

Winter Service Update

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As we head into winter and as the holiday festivities begin, we wanted to let our authors know in advance that they may experience a slight delay in the peer review process of their manuscript if they submit anytime between now and the end of the year. This is because many of our academic editors and external referees will be out of the office at some point during the holiday season.

Despite many people being on vacation, the work of the journal continues and so we will endeavor to ensure that all manuscripts submitted to PLOS ONE are evaluated as quickly as possible, but please accept our advance apologies for any delays you experience.

In the meantime, we encourage you to visit the following links for information and answers to some of our common questions. For anything not covered here, please contact us at plosone@plos.org and we will respond as quickly as possible.

Image: Emily’s Snowman Cookies by Ralph Daily

PLOS ONE’s New Look: Redesigned for Discovery

The PLOS Product and Development teams are constantly working to enhance the web experience for authors, editors, and readers. Today, we’re unveiling the latest update to PLOS ONE. Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Navigate Faster with Figures
The PLOS ONE home page now features a new way to discover and explore the latest research. Instead of seeing a list of articles, you’ll see a grid of articles each presented with a key figure. Hover over the figure for one-click access to the article’s abstract, figures, or full text.
home Subject Area Browsing
We’ve introduced a brand new way to navigate the research that PLOS ONE publishes across the entire spectrum of subject areas. Dive in by clicking “Subject Areas” at the top of every page. Once you find your preferred topic, click “View all articles” to get to one of our new subject-specific browse pages.
browseThese new pages feature a grid just like the home page, sortable by most recent or most popular allowing you to easily navigate all of PLOS ONE’s research articles. If you prefer, you can switch to a more traditional list of articles. If the subject area you’re browsing isn’t quite what you’re looking for, click the arrow to the left of the subject header to navigate one level up or down our taxonomy.
navIf you’ve found the right subject area for your research, you can click the mail icon to sign up for a weekly email alert for that subject area, or the RSS icon to subscribe to that feed.
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As always, the article page gives you one-click access to the Article Level Metrics (ALMs), author information, comments, and related content.

More to Come
You can expect ongoing improvements to the PLOS ONE web experience. As always, we’ll be looking to the community for feedback and suggestions. Feel free to leave a us a comment below.

NEW – Customized PLOS ONE Email Alerts by Subject Area

PLOS ONE publishes hundreds of articles each week, and keeping up with it all is a challenge. Now you can tailor Journal Alerts to suit your specific research interests, saving valuable time. These new custom weekly emails will deliver the research you are interested in straight to your inbox. Here’s how to set it up:

  1. Login to your PLOS account (or create one)
  2. Click Preferences
  3. Navigate to Journal Alerts
  4. From there, expand the PLOS ONE menu:

 

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Here, you can choose to receive a custom email alert with up to 12 subject areas.   Search for a specific subject, or navigate through the drop-down taxonomy categories to find subject areas you are interested in. You will also see an option to receive all new articles via e-mail.

We hope this helps customize alerts about new PLOS ONE research to your interests, and discover research in new fields as well.  We welcome your thoughts and suggestions on anything we can do to improve this experience further.

PLOS ONE – Measuring Article Impact

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A common misconception of PLOS ONE is that just because we don’t consider perceived impact or novelty when deciding what to publish, doesn’t mean we don’t care about the impact of articles we publish. We of course understand that some papers are more impactful than others. That’s why we’re committed to developing new tools that realistically and unbiasedly evaluate how our papers shape their fields.

The number of citations an article collects offers one perspective on how the work has influenced its field, and is one of the many diverse measures that PLOS Article-Level Metrics provide to help the community measure article impact (others include usage and social sharing).

We recently plotted all citations to every PLOS ONE paper published in 2010 (thanks to our ALM guru Martin Fenner, and to Scopus for the data in the graph above)

The graph tells an interesting story about the range of papers published in PLOS ONE, showing that, from ground-breaking, highly-cited research to small studies that appeal to niche audiences, the journal really is for all of science. But another important thing that arose from this analysis was how much the variability in citations came from the range of subjects we publish. Fields like cell biology are huge and well-funded, with thousands of research groups around the world publishing tens of thousands of papers, while others such as ophthalmology are quite small, with only a few groups actively publishing research. All those extra cell biology papers mean lots of extra citations for the whole field, so papers in this area receive many more citations overall compared to ophthalmology, where only a few hundred papers are published each year.

The catch-all nature of journal metrics, such as the Impact Factor, means that PLOS ONE is considered a ‘top journal’ in the field of ophthalmology, as its Impact Factor is higher than any specialist journal in that field, whereas in the cell biology world we are ‘mid-level’. To address this discrepancy between fields, PLOS now includes relative metrics on all our papers, so readers can see the activity around a paper (just page views so far) relative to others in its field. As a result, you can see at the article level the impact of specific research on its field.

My feeling is that PLOS ONE has a wider citation distribution than most other journals, although I haven´t seen their data to say for certain (I would love for more journals to start displaying their full citation data!). But while it’s great to see a good number of PLOS ONE papers receiving very high numbers of citations, I think the more notable achievement is that we really are publishing all kinds of research, regardless of its estimated impact, and letting the community decide what is worthy of citation. With the usual flurry of Impact Factor announcements due to start any day now, it’s a good time to remember that it is the papers, not the journals they´re published in, that make the impact.

Graph: This is a kernel density estimation of citation distribution rather than actual numbers, hence the fact that it looks like some papers have received fewer than zero citations (credit Martin Fenner)

 

 

Summer Service Update

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It’s mid-June and here in the US and in many other parts of the world, academics are taking advantage of the sunshine and long days to spend time in the field, attend conferences or on a well-deserved holiday. As a result we find that many of our editorial board members and reviewers are away from their desks.  Therefore, authors may notice a slight delay in the review progress of papers submitted to PLOS ONE in the coming months.

We continue to aim for a swift evaluation of all submissions and will monitor the review progress as usual but we very much appreciate your patience during this time. Please see the links below for additional information on some common issues and feel free to contact us at plosone@plos.org if you need any further assistance.

From all of us at PLOS, have a great summer!

 

Image: Summer Smile… by Criss!