Erling Rognli writes:

Thanks for kind words about our paper in your blog post. I very much agree about the main advantage being able to ask the right questions, because you’re not so constrained by available analyses.

I’d just like to mention to you a reflection that came up in our research group the other day, during a discussion of publication and research ethics, perhaps also of interest to the blog audience?

We discussed how retractions and corrections of papers are rarely listed in publication lists in CVs and the like. Is that your impression as well? It clearly does not seem to be standard practice, and researchers (perhaps accurately) expect that including retractions and corrections will make others find their CV/publication list less impressive. However, such an explicit listing could equally well be seen as an indicator of willingness to admit errors and correct the scientific record. Shouldn’t we be sceptical about a long list of publications with no listed published corrections or retracted papers? As the number of publications increase, the probability that none of them contain errors must surely approach zero. Perhaps a norm for having a list of corrections and retractions along with a list of publications would be a step towards normalising errors and encouraging correcting them?

I don’t know what’s the best thing to do here! If you go to my list of published papers, you’ll find 4 that had to be corrected. I guess that maybe others contain minor errors, but these are the only four that I know of. I list all 4 correction notices on my CV but not as a separate category.

As to your idea that scholars with publications should be expected to have corrections, I’m not sure. I’d think that many successful scholars have never needed to make corrections. Sure, I have 4 published corrections, but I’ve published many hundreds of papers: less than 1% needed to be corrected. So it seems reasonable to me to suppose that other scholars could publish 100 papers or more without any that would require formal correction or retraction.

One thing that would be cool for each of us to have a list of all the mistakes we’ve made in our research. I’ve had various bad ideas, conjectures that didn’t work out, and even if they didn’t require formal corrections, they’re still errors. The trouble here is that the sort of people who publish lots of errors are also the kind of people who won’t admit that they made any mistakes in the first place!