Division of Spine and Peripheral Nerve Surgery, Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, 901 Walnut Street 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA, 19107, USA.
School of Osteopathic Medicine, Rowan University, Stratford, NJ, USA.
Acta Neurochir (Wien). 2021 Jan;163(1):13-18. doi: 10.1007/s00701-020-04576-3. Epub 2020 Sep 22.
The reference list is an important part of academic manuscripts. The goal of this study is to evaluate the reference accuracy in the field of neurosurgery.
This study examines four major peer-reviewed neurosurgery journals, chosen based on their clinical impact factor: Neurosurgery, J Neurosurg, World Neurosurg, and Acta Neurochir. For each of the four journals, five articles from each of the journal's 12 issues published in 2019 were randomly selected using an online generator. This resulted in a total of 240 articles, 60 from each journal. Additionally, from each article's list of references, one reference was again randomly selected and checked for a citation or quotation error. The chi-square test was used to analyze the association between the occurrence of citation and quotation errors and the presence of hypothesized risk factors that could impact reference accuracy.
62.1% of articles had a minor citation error, 8.33% had a major citation error, 12.1% had a minor quotation error, and 5.8% of articles had a major quotation error. Overall, Acta Neurochir presented with the fewest quotation errors compared with the other journals evaluated. The only association between the frequency of errors and potential markers of reference mistakes was with the length of the bibliography. Surprisingly, this correlation indicated that the articles with longer reference lists had fewer citation errors (p < 0.01). Statistical significance was found between the occurrence of citation errors and the journals of publication (p < 0.01).
In order to advance medical treatment and patient care in neurosurgery, detailed documentation and attention to detail are necessary. The results from this analysis illustrate that improved reference accuracy is required.
参考文献是学术手稿的重要组成部分。本研究的目的是评估神经外科学领域的参考文献准确性。
本研究检查了四个主要的同行评审神经外科期刊，根据其临床影响因子选择：神经外科、J Neurosurg、世界神经外科和神经外科学报。对于每个期刊，使用在线生成器从该期刊 2019 年出版的 12 期的每一期中随机选择 5 篇文章。这总共产生了 240 篇文章，每个期刊 60 篇。此外，从每篇文章的参考文献列表中，再次随机选择一个参考文献，并检查引文或引语错误。使用卡方检验分析引文和引语错误的发生与可能影响参考文献准确性的假设风险因素之间的关联。
62.1%的文章有轻微的引文错误，8.33%有主要的引文错误，12.1%有轻微的引语错误，5.8%的文章有主要的引语错误。总的来说，神经外科学报与评估的其他期刊相比，引语错误最少。错误频率与潜在参考文献错误标记之间唯一的关联是参考书目长度。令人惊讶的是，这种相关性表明参考文献列表较长的文章引文错误较少（p < 0.01）。引文错误的发生与出版期刊之间存在统计学意义（p < 0.01）。
为了推进神经外科的医疗和患者护理，需要详细的文件记录和对细节的关注。本分析的结果表明需要提高参考文献的准确性。
