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I want to cite a paper [A], which has been corrected by an erratum [B] in the same journal. I have not found a rule how to cite this case. Is it proper to cite [A,B], or just [A] or just [B].

I am rather looking for a recommendation by some sort of scientific organization or major journal than for personal opinion, so please provide a link.

2 Answers 2

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An erratum would usually only include the part to be corrected from the original publication. Hence it would be insufficient to cite just the erratum and not the original article. Examples of such errata are shown in the US NLM site. Thus you must cite both original article as well as the errtum.

But there is a method to cite errata. You should cite the original article [A] in the main section and cite the errata [B] after the citation info of [A] in the references section.

Similar to this.

References:

[A] Authors of A. Title of A. In conf./article/report/etc. Erratum. Author of B [B]

[B] Info of B...

A simple example is provided in the answer here.

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  • Should I use bold font for the word "Erratum" just to remind people?
    – zyy
    Feb 23, 2020 at 5:07
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    You ought to confirm the norms with the publisher. If this is your own form of publishing, it would be up to your preference, although I’ll prefer italicised.
    – Ébe Isaac
    Feb 23, 2020 at 5:52
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@Ébe's advice is probably best for the [1] [2] scientific style of references. In many humanities disciplines using footnotes, however, it's simplest and most common to append the errata information to the end of the publication unless you want to discuss the errata individually. So something like:

  • Michael Cuthbert, "Common tones in simple time," Journal of Music Theology 11 (2016), pp. 220-230, errata v. 12 (2017), p. 294.

Whether to italicize errata in a citation like that (is it still Latin? or now English?) is up to you.

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    This is also what I'd do with the [1] [2] style that I ordinarily use (in mathematics and computer science). In the text, there would be simply [7]. In the list of references at the end of my paper, item 7 would look like what's in your answer. Jun 9, 2018 at 20:47

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