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Sixty seconds on . . . spelling errors
BMJ 2024; 387 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q2414 (Published 01 November 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;387:q2414
- Matthew Limb
- London
Doctor, I’ve been reading about pubic health and I’m worried
You mean public health?
What happened there?
You’ve found the error strewn world of academia.
But publishing standards are rising, surely?
Not according to analysis of over 32 million research abstracts published over the past 50 years. Eleven of 15 common spelling errors have increased over time, with most showing a strong increase. The total error rate has jumped from 0.1 per 10 000 abstracts in 1970 to 8.7 per 10 000 in 2023.
How do we know?
Statistics experts Adrian Barnett and Nicole White, from Queensland University of Technology, Australia, analysed trends over time.1 They’d already found researchers were …
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