Reference List Accuracy in Social Work Journals

Abstract

This exploratory study investigated the rate of citation errors in the reference lists of five social work journals. High error rates have been found in journals in fields such as medicine and psychology but have not yet been investigated in social work journals. A stratified, computer-generated random sample was selected (N = 500, 100 per journal), and each reference was verified against the original work for accuracy in six fields: article title, author name(s), journal title, pagination, volume, and year. In examining the total sample of 500 references across the five journals, 206 references (41.2%) contained at least one error. Suggestions for reduction of error rates are discussed, as are suggestions for future study in this area.