Have you seen a typo in Publication, and ignored it?
Diagnosis of glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) in blood is essential for patients with diabetes.
I recently pointed out typographical errors in the way HbA1c is mentioned in scientific articles. I found that HbA1c is misspelled as HbAlc (small L in place of 1), HbAIc (capital i in place of 1), and even Hb1Ac (1 after Hb).
I am curious to know if there are other such unintentional typo errors that generally get ignored by the readers. If you happen to come across any such, please let me know in the comments.
Any suggestion, ideas or concerns are also welcome.
Article The trend of misspelled HbA1c in scientific articles
Personally, I don't think anyone cares. 10% might (?) notice. 3% (?) might care, and that 3% probably cares more about improper over-use or under-use of comas, or improper hyphenation. I once listened to a medical school histology professor spend, literally, no less than 8 minutes ranting about how terrible it was that a prestigious journal had hyphenated a word incorrectly at a line break. That was more important than helping us prepare for that day's exam.
Here in the US in clinical practice it is common to see hemoglobin abbreviated as Hg. So, I get to see "Hg1Ac", We should all work towards a world where less serum mercury winds up being glycosylated!
One area where I personally do get confused regards standards of abbreviating terms with capital letters. Terms like PPAR and PGC-1 for example, I recognize, without remembering what the letters stand for. I get confused when I sometimes see these spelled out instead of being abbreviated, and I have to go back and check to confirm that it's what I think it is.
On a side note, I am forever grateful that so much literature is in my native language. I do fear that some quality work is undervalued when grammar doesn't match native standards. It's extra work to recruit the native speaker (or language expert) to check for all the non-logical nuances. Lower quality papers often have poor english grammar and I'm sad when I see the same for higher quality papers.
Cheers.
Hi Ram,
We can't always blame the authors for such errors in print or online. In my experience, it will occasionally be a copy-editing issue. That has happened to me before and usually impossible to correct post-print. In the past, I won't have checked all 10 or so pages of the proof with a fine-tooth comb but I do now!
Andy K H Lim I agree with the copy editing issue! I remember a draft that included a temperature gradient of delta (a triangle) 3.4 degrees Celsius expressing a temperature increase. The copy editor wanted to add a Fahrenheit value to this. (This was technically for a press release, but I think it is representative of manuscripts as well). What did they add? The 3.4 C was converted into 38 F, in order to say that an increase of 3.4 C was equivalent to an increase by 38 F.
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