The Misrepresentation of Petri Dish, as “petri” Dish, in the Scientific Literature

The Petri dish is, without a doubt, a very basic, yet important and popular tool in microbiological and other biomedical experiments. It serves primarily as a support or structural platform for placing, growing or testing biological specimens, whether these be microbiological, animal, plant or human. Given its size, usually about 10 cm in diameter, the Petri dish is an ideal platform for cellular and tissue cultures. Despite the commonality of Petri dishes, quite surprisingly, there is a pervasive error throughout the biomedical literature, namely its misspelling as “petri” dish. This is not a trivial issue since this dish is named after a scientist, Julius Richard Petri (1852–1921), so the upper-case “P” should not be represented as a lower-case “p”. It is important to alert students and seasoned biomedical researchers, as well as the wider public, who might use this term, about the need to use the term Petri accurately, in order


Introduction
Biomedical researchers might take some very basic tools for granted in the laboratory, not because they are not important, but because they are so commonly used that they have become almost common place.One of those tools is the Petri dish (sometimes Petri plate), a plastic or glass dish, typically about 10 cm in diameter, but with varying diameters, that is most frequently used for growing a culture of microbial, plant, animal, or human cells, or tissues and organs in the latter three groups, in order to study wide-ranging hypotheses in biomedicine.Experiments in basic and applied biology often require Petri dishes, and in most instances, except for rare exceptions, they need to be sterile in order to avoid microbial contamination.Pre-ordered plastic Petri dishes are often packaged and pre-sterilized because they cannot be autoclaved since they melt, so they tend to serve only once, whereas glass Petri dishes can be easily autoclaved and reused multiple times.The gap between the base and lid can be sealed with a gas-permeable membrane such as Parafilm ® , making it suitable for the culture of living cells and tissues.These characteristics make Petri dishes practical and versatile.In contrast to literal and tangible Petri dishes, figurative Petri dishes or experimental sand-pits where ideas are theoretically tested and explored (Wei et al. 2021) 1 , are not covered in this paper.
The origin of the word "Petri dish" is historically ascribed to a German scientist, a microbiologist, Julius Richard Petri, hence the use of his last or family name in Petri dish (Grote, 2018).The selfattribution of the name to a single scientist has been the subject of some challenge and controversy, the main argument being that other deserving scientists also contributed to the use and popularization of these dishes, and not only Petri (Shama, 2019).Placing that controversy aside, the name of the Petri dish should be revised to something else, such as "culture dish", in order to reflect a more historically neutral name.In the context of this paper, the correct term, with an upper-case "P", i.e., Petri dish, is assumed.Consequently, the spelling as "petri" dish, with a lower-case "p", is considered an error.This issue is not limited to academic research.Recently (May 30, 2022), a US Republican politician, Marjorie Taylor Greene, referred to Petri dishes as "peach tree dishes", while attempting to describe the artificial culture of meat cells 2 .
This paper has two objections.First, to provide an appreciation of the use of Petri dishes in a wide range of recent (2021-2022) research applications.Second, given that "petri" dish is a de facto erroneous form of Petri dish, PubMed was consulted in order to gain some appreciation of the extent of this error by assessing the frequency of this error in 2022 indexed literature.

The wide use of Petri dishes in biomedicaland other -research
A search (June 4, 2022) for "Petri dish" on some popular openly available databases 3 , namely PubMed, Elsevier's sciencedirect.com,Springer Nature's Springerlink and Google Scholar revealed 1880, 107,649 123,168 and 588,000 hits, respectively.Evidently, even though many results are likely to be false positives, these findings point towards a popular topic and/or tool, primarily in the biomedical literature.
In order to identify papers that would exemplify the wide-ranging use of Petri dishes in the biomedical literature, the Google Scholar search was limited to 2021-2022, i.e., relatively new literature, to identify studies that represented the use of Petri dishes in a wide range of experimental settings.Some papers, including those that are cited, employed the erroneous spelling "petri", as indicated in Table 1, and whereas this error exists in the original title, the error is faithfully transcribed as such 2 "…a cheeseburger which is very bad because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat that grows in a peach tree dish, so you'll probably get a little zap inside your body and that say "no, no", don't eat a real cheeseburger, you need to eat the fake, the fake burger, the fake meat from Bill Gates" (Kaonga 2022, at 13/14 seconds; transcribed by the author after listening carefully to the video transcript).
3 Scopus and Web of Science were not consulted since they are proprietary and thus not free to access or search.in the reference list, but is labelled with "[sic]" (e.g., Singh et al. 2022), to indicate this error.
This section is neither a review, nor a comprehensive or exhaustive exploration of the application of Petri dishes in biomedical and other research, but serves only to highlight a wide range of studies that showcase their application.Generally, Petri dishes are used either as a solid base or with a liquid.In the latter case, typically, shake flasks would likely be used for liquid-based cell cultures.In the case of solid use, Petri dishes may be dry, with a solidified medium, such as agar, or with a moistened base, such as filter paper, directly on the base of the dish, or overlaying the medium.In several cases shown in Table 1, Petri dishes are used for very simplistic -yet important, standard and convenientpurposes, such as a platform on which to place experimental samples.In such cases, they are almost essential materials.Petri dishes also serve as a useful tray to weigh reagents on a scale.Petri dishes are popular containers for studying the behavior of organisms because they are transparent, so biological samples can be observed at least clearly from the top and bottom, and can also be photographed under a light microscope.A wide range of applications across several fields of study, often multidisciplinary in nature, are presented in Table 1.Even though several (16/38, or 42%) of these studies employed the erroneous version of Petri dish (i.e., petri dish), as indicated by an asterisk in Table 1, readers are cautioned that the existence of this error alone should not exclude the use and citation of such studies, i.e., this typographic error does not invalidate these studies' scientific merit.

Petri dish-related errors in PubMed
As briefly mentioned above, a search on PubMed revealed 1880 results, including all fields (title, abstract, etc.).Curiously, a search for "Petri dish" and "petri dish" revealed identical search results, suggesting that PubMed does not recognize, or differentiate, this error.This compounds prior concerns about errors, inaccuracies and scientifically suspect literature present in this popular biomedical database (Teixeira da Silva 2023).
Limiting the search to 2022, revealed a total of 50 hits, the entries of which were manually examined to ascertain where the error existed (i.e., in the title or abstract), or not.The full texts, several of which could not be accessed, were not examined, also because full texts do not form part of the indexing in PubMed.That assessment revealed that out of 50 hits, 24 (48%) contained the erroneous "petri dish".Strictly speaking, in a biomedical literature that strives to be as accurate and error-free as possible, such errors would need to be corrected (Teixeira da Silva 2016).The reason being that a biomedical researcher, that unsuspectingly uses a paper that employs the erroneous form of "Petri dish", may unwittingly carry this error forward in their own scientific paper, thereby propagating the error downstream in the information flow, i.e., in citing papers (Teixeira da Silva 2016).Finally, some may argue that if such errors would be corrected every time that an error was detected, for example during post-publication peer review, especially those, who may argue that such errors are minor or trivial, that the literature would be awash with errata.This suggests that current models for correcting the literature are insufficiently robust or unsustainable (Teixeira da Silva 2022).It is precisely for this reason that the dual-DOI-based "publication history" was devised, in order for the publication record to be continually updated without disrupting the flow of information caused by intrusive or obtrusive errata, or other literature updates (Teixeira da Silva, Nazarovets 2022).

Conclusion and limitations
The Petri dish is, as has been appreciated in this paper and given, how widely it appears in some major databases, it shows how popular, useful, and versatile a tool and support structure in basic and applied biomedical research it is.In some cases, given its application to technologies and scientific discoveries that may find applications in society, it is a term that might appear in public, and thus be the subject of public and even political debate.The "petri dish" error is thus not only limited to biomedical researchers, but also to the wider public.In that sense, this paper serves informative, educational and corrective purposes.Finally, the argument is made that since "petri" dish is a de facto erroneous form of Petri dish, that scientific literature, especially that, which is indexed in leading scientific platforms such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar, is in the need of correction.It can be argued that journals or publishers that derive benefit (e.g., citations, sales, etc.) from erroneous literature, and who turn a blind eye to errors in literature that they distribute and sell, derive such benefit unfairly (Teixeira da Silva, Vuong 2021).
In the third section of this paper, a small analysis is shown, which has been conducted using only PubMed, because Web of Science and Scopus are proprietary and thus the databases are not freely accessible.In PubMed, to gain a crude appreciation of the level of this error, 2022 data was examined in detail, revealing a 48% error rate (title or abstract), or 42% in the sample set examined separately, as shown in Table 1 (whole texts).Scientific sleuths with advanced bibliometric and informatics skills that are interested in this topic would do well to explore PubMed and other major databases in greater detail to appreciate if these values are consistent over several years, or if there are country-, journal-, or publisher-based patterns of errors.

Conflicts of interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest of relevance to this topic.

Author contributions
The author contributed fully to the intellectual discussion underlying this paper, literature exploration, writing, reviews and editing, and accepts responsibility for the content, analyses and interpretation herein.