Manuscript Preparation, Copyediting, and Proofreading

Q. In the references section of a paper I’m editing, I found a misspelled word. I checked the original journal and found that it was published with this mistake. Should I correct the typo or leave it as is? My colleague says the typo should stay because this is how it appeared in print originally. Thanks a lot!

A. You may correct the typo. If an error has important implications that you want to point out, you can reproduce the error and write [sic] after it, but it’s not nice to do this just to point out that someone made a mistake. (Of course, you must be very, very certain that it’s actually a typo before you change it.)