An editorial oversight has turned a report on fish pigmentation into one of the year's most talked-about papers. The study of poeciliid fishes, first published online in July by the journal Ethology (Z. W. Culumber et al. Ethology 120, 1090–1100; 2014), received scant attention until ecologist David Harris at the University of California, Davis, tweeted a screenshot of one of its pages, highlighting this phrase in parentheses: “Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?” Harris added his own comment on Twitter: “Not sure how this made it through proofreading, peer review and copy editing.” In one of dozens of responses, Tim Elfenbein, managing editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology, tweeted: “Note to authors: you are ultimately responsible for the work that bears your name, no matter the level of editing.” See go.nature.com/3bswdt for more.
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Unusual reference attracts notoriety. Nature 515, 315 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/515315e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/515315e