A guide to reducing citation errors in bibliographies

It is a common experience that by the time one finishes compiling a manuscript and reaches the stage of compiling the bibliography, a sense of fatigue sets in. Generally, people type the bibliography on the computer themselves or seek the help of a professional to do it; this is subsequently corrected by the author. However, even after corrections, errors remain in several references by virtue of errors in quoting authors (including the correct number, order, initials and spelling), article title, journal title (including proper Index Medicus abbreviation), volume number, page number and year.

Potentially more damaging are the errors where the name of one journal is replaced by another. In many instances, references do not conform to the uniform medical reporting system. The number of errors encountered is inversely related to the diligence of the author and the time spent by him/her in correcting the bibliography. The magnitude of the problem can be gauged by the sheer number of articles published on this subject.¹,²

That the problem still persists is evident from a recent article in Emergency Medical Journal, which found an error rate of 19%.³ We also faced this problem of errors in bibliography in the early part of our career and subsequently devised a strategy to overcome this problem. It is likely that some of you are already using it, and to readers familiar with computers, this will appear very trivial. However, we realised that the majority of our colleagues are unaware of this method, which prompted us to share it with your readers. We believe that postgraduate students in developing countries are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of this communication.

Pubmed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db = PubMed) is now a standard search engine for medical professionals. After we have listed our references, we start with the author of first reference and put it in the search window of PubMed, which then lists the indexed publications of that author in chronological order. Searching by the names of more than one author of the particular reference limits the number of search results and makes the job of finding the relevant reference easier. After the reference has been found, it is selected by clicking the small rectangular box next to the reference. Next, we click on the “send to” icon and select the “text” option. This provides the details of the reference in a text format, which can then be saved in a separate document file (we use Microsoft Word software).

This procedure is repeated for all the references and we thus get a compiled bibliography that can then be formatted to any style. If the search for a particular reference yields “no item found”, this signifies that there is some mistake in typing the author's name. Under these circumstances, a search can be made using the names of other authors of that reference. Alternatively, index terms from the title of reference can be used. Once the bibliography is complete, we recommend checking it against the original articles to safeguard against any possible errors in PubMed.

This strategy can provide all the indexed publications. However, references from books and non‐indexed publications cannot be obtained by this method. We hope that this communication will help postgraduate students and those many authors who publish cases infrequently.