Citation Accuracy in the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Literature

Purpose

Readers frequently assume that the references in an article published in a well-respected, peer-reviewed journal will be cited correctly. However, previous studies have shown that this is not always true. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the citation accuracy in 5 oral and maxillofacial surgery journals.

Materials and Methods

A search was done using PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=PubMed) to locate the articles cited in 108 references in each journal. If the article could not be located, a search was done in the specific journal in the medical library. The references were then divided into those with major errors that prevented the article from being located and those with minor errors that still permitted the article to be found.

Results

There were a significant number of citations with major errors in each of the journals that made it impossible to find these articles. No correlation was found between the number of major or minor errors and the rank of the senior author or if the article was submitted from a non English-speaking country.

Conclusions

This study shows that there needs to be a greater effort on the part of authors to provide accurate citations in their articles.