Major inaccuracies in articles citing occupational or environmental medicine papers and their implications.
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TL;DR
The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of references specifically citing manuscripts concerning occupational and environmental medicine, as well as to evaluate the pattern of the errors in citing papers and the implications of these errors in terms of article citation rate.
Abstract
Bibliographic citations or references are an important component of all scientific manuscripts, but sufficient attention is not always paid to them. In fact, more than fifteen years ago, de Lacey and colleagues reported an astonishingly high rate of reference errors in articles published in general medical journals [1], and some studies since then have confirmed this phenomenon in many different biomedical journals [2–4]. These studies selected samples of citations in various periodicals and checked their accuracy, in other words, whether or not the information found in the reference lists was correct. Currently, to our knowledge, no published data has described the percentage of inaccurate citations citing specific articles. The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of references specifically citing manuscripts concerning occupational and environmental medicine, as well as to evaluate the pattern of the errors in citing papers and the implications of these errors in terms of article citation rate. The cited papers were those published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine (OEM), because this journal was one well-known, if not the best-known, journal in this discipline and had the highest impact factor (IF). The second reason was that the tables of contents and the abstracts were easily accessible from the journal's Website .