Missing author added to European digital public health competency review
A correction to Author Correction: A competency framework for digital public health in Europe: an updated scoping review has added Melanie Maria Kuhm to the author list. The omission involved her affiliation with the European Public Health Association’s Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Section in Utrecht and the Department of Digital Health and Data Infrastructures at Gesundheit Österreich GmbH in Vienna.
In a field built on collaboration, authorship is not administrative clutter. It is the formal record of who helped shape the evidence base, interpret the framework, and carry responsibility for the final publication. A missing name can distort credit, blur institutional contribution, and complicate later citation tracking across a rapidly expanding digital health literature.
Authorship correction and institutional attribution
The corrected article now identifies Melanie Maria Kuhm among the contributors to the scoping review published in npj Digital Public Health. Her affiliation spans two European institutions: the EUPHA Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Section in Utrecht and the Austrian National Public Health Institute’s Department of Digital Health and Data Infrastructures in Vienna. Those affiliations matter because competency frameworks in public health are often assembled across national borders, professional societies, and policy-oriented research groups rather than a single academic center.
The author list also reflects the breadth of the project’s network. Contributors were listed across Maastricht University, the University of Bremen, Jagiellonian University Medical College, the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, the University of Rennes, the Catholic University of Croatia, the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Türkiye, HIMSS in Chicago, and the WHO Collaborating Center for Public Health Leadership and Workforce Development in Maastricht. The corrected record restores one missing node in that collaborative structure.
One omitted author can alter the historical record of a paper more than readers may realize.
Why a correction to a competency framework matters
A competency framework in digital public health is not a narrow technical artifact. It defines the knowledge, skills, and professional expectations that shape how public health systems use digital tools, data infrastructures, and analytics. When such a framework is adapted for Europe, authorship is tied to more than credit; it signals intellectual ownership over how the field should train, organize, and standardize its workforce.
Corrections of this kind are also important for transparency. Research teams that span multiple disciplines often rely on distributed drafting, iterative revisions, and section-specific expertise. In that environment, a missing author can reflect a publication workflow error rather than a scientific dispute. The correction restores the author record without changing the underlying content of the scoping review itself.
The publication information remains otherwise straightforward: the original article was published online on 16 June 2026, and the correction was published on 27 October 2026 with DOI 10.1038/s44482-026-00050-6. The journal version remains open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, preserving reuse and redistribution rights while requiring appropriate credit and disclosure of changes.
Open access and the permanence of the citation trail
Because the correction carries its own DOI and version of record, it becomes part of the permanent citation chain. That is especially important for systematic and scoping reviews, where downstream papers may cite not only findings but also author teams, institutional networks, and methodological provenance. In digital public health, where policy, education, and implementation often travel faster than the underlying literature, accurate attribution helps ensure that expertise is traceable across future guidance documents and training materials.
The corrected authorship list now includes Jelena Schmidt, Mariusz Duplaga, Nolwenn Le Meur, Brian Li Han Wong, Laura Maaß, Anamaria Malešević, Şükran Peker, Melanie Maria Kuhm, Kristina Weishäupl, Mariam Shokralla, and Rok Hržič. Laura Maaß remains the corresponding author.
For readers, the practical implication is simple: the review’s scientific content has not been revised in this notice, but the record of who produced it has been corrected. In a collaborative public health domain, that distinction protects both professional credit and the integrity of the literature. No new data, outcomes, or competency statements were introduced in the correction itself, and the notice functions strictly as a formal amendment to authorship.