School of Engineering, Mercer University, Macon, GA, USA.
JSLS. 2022 Jan-Mar;26(1). doi: 10.4293/JSLS.2021.00082.
References for medical articles are not always retrievable. This eliminates the ability to check on the validity of statements, methodologies, data collection, and conclusions.
References of review, scientific, and research articles published in the 2019 and 2020 were evaluated for ability to retrieve the reference cited.
Ninety-five articles with 2,424 references were evaluated. There were 1,025 (1,025/2,424 = 42.3%) open access versus 1,399 (1,399/2,424 = 47.7%) paywall articles. There were 357 (14.7%) citations unavailable (misreference) due to bad, broken, or nonexistent links and wrong article, abstract or citation only, and missing citations.
Loss of reference existence or retrievability is a scientific hazard. Science is self-correcting but is doomed to not knowing what was said or discovered when references are no longer available.
并非所有医学文章的参考文献都可检索到。这使得人们无法核实其陈述、方法、数据收集和结论的有效性。
评估了 2019 年和 2020 年发表的综述、科学和研究文章的参考文献，以确定能否检索到所引用的参考文献。
评估了 95 篇文章，共 2424 条参考文献。其中，有 1025 条（1025/2424=42.3%）为开放获取文章，1399 条（1399/2424=47.7%）为付费墙文章。由于链接错误、破损或不存在，以及文章、摘要或引文仅为错误引用和缺少引文，有 357 条（14.7%）引文无法获取（引用错误）。
参考文献的缺失或无法检索是一种科学风险。科学具有自我纠错功能，但当参考文献不再可用时，科学也注定无法得知之前的陈述或发现。
