Archive for August 26th, 2014

Correction in Cites & Insights 14:9

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

Thanks to the eagle eye of an early reader, I was alerted to an error on page 15, column 2, of Cites & Insights 14:9. While there are almost certainly grammatical and spelling errors in every issue, this one was a math error that changed the significance of the paragraph–and since it was caught so early, I did something I normally never do: I fixed the paragraph, added a “[Corrected 8/26/14]” flag, and reissued the publication.

If you’ve already read it or downloaded it and don’t wish to do so again, here’s the change:

In the paragraph beginning “Most of the university libraries…” (in the subsection “Elsevier journals–some facts”), I managed to reverse the British pounds to dollars calculation. Doing it properly means changing the last two sentences in the paragraph.

What was there originally:

Notably, assuming that a pound is worth $1.70, JISC struck a much harder bargain than American public universities in general: the range is from $7.36 to $49.27, with a mean of $18.45, less than half the mean for U.S. institutions. of course, the package may very well be different.

I was somehow dividing pounds by $1.70 rather than multiplying them. Fixing that yields this text:

Converting to dollars, the range is $21.27 to $142.39 with a mean of $53.37—higher than the U.S. figures except at the low end. [Corrected 8/26/14.]

My apologies for the error.