Author Correction Tightens the Record on a Global Framework for Surgical Augmented Reality
A correction in npj Digital Surgery has amended the spelling of one author’s name in the article announcing a global framework for evaluating augmented reality in surgery. The paper originally listed Hizirwan Shukri Salim incorrectly as Hizirwan Salim. The journal has now corrected the record in the original article.
The change is narrow, but in scholarly publishing it carries real weight. Authorship is not a cosmetic detail; it determines credit, discoverability, indexing accuracy, and the integrity of the scientific record. A misspelled name can fragment citation tracking and make it harder for colleagues, databases, and institutions to connect an investigator with the work they helped produce. In a field such as surgical technology, where multidisciplinary teams often span clinical departments, engineering groups, and international collaborators, precise attribution matters to the people building the evidence base as much as to the readers consuming it.
The corrected article sits in a highly technical area of operative care. Augmented reality in surgery depends on aligning digital information with real anatomy in ways that can assist planning, navigation, and intraoperative orientation. Framework papers in this area often serve as shared reference points for later studies, helping investigators compare systems, outcomes, and evaluation methods using common standards. A correction to authorship does not alter that scientific content, but it does restore accuracy around who contributed to a paper intended to shape how the field measures itself.
One name, fixed. The scientific message remains the same.
The correction notice identifies the article as “Announcement of one global framework for evaluating augmented reality in surgery,” originally published on 1 September 2026 in npj Digital Surgery. The version of record carries the updated spelling and retains the original DOI trail linking the correction to the source publication. This is the sort of administrative repair that usually passes quickly through the literature, yet it has durable implications for author identity systems, citation exports, and institutional records.
The author list attached to the correction shows a broad international collaboration. Affiliations include University Medical Center Utrecht, Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, SURF bv, Tilburg University, Erasmus MC, University College London, Johns Hopkins University, Heidelberg University, and Radboud University Medical Center. That range signals the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary surgical technology research, where clinicians, data scientists, imaging specialists, and engineering researchers frequently work side by side. In that environment, exact name spelling is not trivia. It is part of the infrastructure that keeps collaborative science legible.
Corrections like this also reveal how fragile digital scholarship can be when metadata are imperfect. Search engines, bibliographic databases, and institutional repositories often depend on precise strings of text to group publications correctly. A single missing surname element may be enough to split an author’s record, especially when names are transliterated, abbreviated, or entered into multiple systems across different institutions. For a senior investigator, that can affect publication counts and discoverability. For a junior researcher, the consequences may be even more immediate, because a first important paper can be harder to retrieve and attribute accurately.
The article itself remains an open-access publication under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which allows reuse and redistribution with proper credit. Open-access distribution makes accurate author metadata even more important, because the paper is designed to travel widely across platforms and repositories. A corrected name ensures that the credit travels with it.
In surgical research, precision usually refers to anatomy, measurement, or image registration. This correction shows that precision also applies to the bibliographic layer surrounding the science. When an article proposes a global framework for evaluating a fast-moving technology, the names attached to that framework become part of the record that future investigators will cite, compare, and build upon. The correction therefore serves both a practical and archival function: it restores the identity of one contributor and preserves the integrity of the article as a citable source.
The notice does not describe any change to the framework itself, and no clinical data were altered. The correction is limited to authorship, but that limitation is also its point. Scientific publishing depends on these small repairs to keep the record faithful to what was actually written, reviewed, and accepted. In a field where digital tools are being scrutinized for accuracy, the literature’s own metadata must meet the same standard.