Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
HEALTHMED, sa.6, ss.2066-2073, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
Background: Reference lists serve as a resource for the author's ideas. Inaccurate references hinder retrieval of documents, may prevent researchers from examining all of the work by an author and may result in authors not getting credit for their work. The aim of this study was to determine the number and types of errors in nursing research journal reference lists. Methods: Randomly selected eight hundred references collected from the Public Health Nursing, Community Health Nursing, Journal of Clinical Nursing, Journal of Wound Ostomy and Continence Nursing, European Journal of Cancer Nursing, Cancer Nursing, Nephrology Nursing Journal, Journal of Neuroscience Nursing in 2008 were evaluated for citation errors. There were 2785 citations of these journals during the study period. One hundred references from each journal were selected randomly and analyzed for accuracy. Results: The overall error rate was 34.8% (342), 92.7% (317) of references error were major and 7.3% (25) of references error were minor. Conclusion: The results of this study are important in that they attract attention towards reference errors in the nursing literature. Researchers should also exercise caution with offering references and should definitely write their references in accordance with original sources. They should check their articles in terms of accuracy in references before sending them for publication. Authors should avoid unnecessary use of references and write references in accordance with instructions to authors required by journals. Reviewers should also make sure that references in the articles they reviewed are accurate.