Familiarity breeds…?

If you do a good job of editing, the occurrence of errors in a publication should be minimal. ILS succeeds quite well in this regard, as readers are rarely notified of errors in our editorial.

We started 2015 on the wrong foot by making a blunder, for which I, as the Editor-in-Chief, assume full responsibility. In the January/February issue's Annual Economic Review on page 8, Table 4 has the wrong data. The correct Table 4 is as shown below:

I feel so guilty about letting this slip by that I owe readers an explanation. The data that appeared in the January/February ILS article came from the same source, our partner at Strategies Unlimited. In fact, it is the correct data appearing in a table on fiber laser usage in micro-material processing that appears in the report on fiber lasers that they published last year. Somehow during data transfer to the ILS illustrator, the wrong data for Table 4 ended up in print.

How did I miss it? I was so familiar with the correct Tables, working from drafts, that I did not check the final galley carefully enough. Lesson learned after 30 years of editing ILS—check every galley minutely.

I apologize to readers who use the data; I will be extra diligent to ensure this does not repeat.