Given the following javadoc (note the missing opening curly brace in the @linkplain tag): IDEA reports "Period in the documentation is missing". In other cases (methods that have non-void returns), missing opening or closing braces cause reports that "Required tag '@return' is missing", instead of identifying the real problem. In general, the javadoc inspections don't do a good job with embedded tags: The two most common errors--missing parameter lists in @link and @linkplain tags and mistyping a parenthesis for a brace are either not reported at all or (as in the example above) misreported.