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8 months ago, I have submitted my paper to the top journal in my field and finally it got accepted. Unfortunately, I have found one wrong table entry (Experiment Section), which is not a logical value at all. More precisely, I was copying from my raw data (in cm) to the paper (in mm) and I forgot to convert one value. Actually the mentioned value is not possible at all and the change does not affect the conclusion of neither the corresponding subsection in the experiment section nor the conclusion of the paper. This paper is very important for my PhD which will take place in few weeks.

I am pretty sure that reviewers did not deeply examine that table, otherwise they would find out the error because it is too obvious. Now, I am wondering how to deal with this issue.

Ps. Another problem is that in the policy of that journal, the paper which needs another major revision will be rejected. Now, I have one week to provide the final revised version.

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    This is not a major revision. Why can't you just change the value in the final version? (And explain to the editor in the cover letter that you are correcting a typo.)
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 12:26
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    That's not a problem. Just change it. Explain that you fixed a typo in the cover letter (because misplacing a decimal point is essentially a typo). If you explain this in the cover letter, you are not misrepresenting yourself. And any editor who would reject the paper for this reason is totally insane.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 12:34
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    A little melodramatic, surely !
    – Strawberry
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 14:16
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    As you yourself say: you forgot to make a conversion (on one figure) and it doesn't affect your results. That is to all intents and purposes a typo. If all your conclusions depended on the wrong figure, then that would be a major change to the paper.
    – TripeHound
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 15:29
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    If this was indeed a career-destroying error, none of us would be employed.
    – Nuclear Hoagie
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 16:32

4 Answers 4

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This is not a major revision. Just change the value in the final version. (And explain to the editor in the cover letter that you are correcting a typo. A misplaced decimal point is essentially a typo.)

You are not misrepresenting yourself in any way. Because you're explaining the change in the cover letter, you are giving the editor the chance to reject the paper if they deem the changes are big enough to count as a "major revision". However, any editor that rejects the paper for that reason would have to be totally insane. Typos get fixed in the final version of papers all the time.

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    Additional detail OP may not be aware of: At this stage of the process, "major revision" does not mean "an important change, one that affects the overall meaning of the paper." It means "a large change, one that will require re-copy-editing and re-typesetting a lot of text." The distinction is a little weird nowadays, what with authors being expected to hand in camera-ready PDFs, but publishing is a very old-fashioned business.
    – zwol
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 15:07
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    @zwol: That depends on whether they're submitting the changes requested by the referees, or are returning the copy edits to the galley proofs. I can't tell which stage they're in from the OP's question. But in either case, it's not a major revision.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 12, 2017 at 15:10
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If you are still in the revision process, changing a single number in the Results section is no problem at all. A simple typo, anywhere in the manuscript, is a minor revision. They will not reject your paper. If worst comes to absolute worst, they will send it back to the referees, but likely that will not happen either.

Just explain the issue to the copy editor or the handling editor - this stuff happens all the time. Don't worry.

Once it has been accepted, things get more difficult, if not impossible to change such stuff.

Once published, an erratum needs to be submitted, which is not a disaster, but does complicate things.

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It's just a typo. It's two characters that were swapped. That's all. It's not a massive change that implies a different conclusion. It's the smallest of small changes.

You're clearly competent and have found an error that your peers who reviewed it failed to find. You'll be fine :)

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... This paper is very important for my PhD which will take place in few weeks.

I am pretty sure that reviewers did not deeply examine that table, otherwise they would find out the error because it is too obvious. Now, I am wondering how to deal with this issue...

Presumably your PhD thesis duplicates the error and is already with your examiners, and your defense is in a few weeks? This isn't an issue. If asked, then you can explain to your examiners that you are aware of the problem and that you fixed the problem in the published version. (I don't know whether it is advisable to raise the issue yourself.)

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