Cited by 162Academic Writing and PublishingPublishing and Scholarly CommunicationAcademic integrity and plagiarism

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 1 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

How accurate are quotations and references in medical journals?

Open access
de Lacey, G, Record, C, Wade, J·1985·BMJ

Abstract

The accuracy of quotations and references in six medical journals published during January 1984 was assessed. The original author was misquoted in 15% of all references, and most of the errors would have misled readers. Errors in citation of references occurred in 24%, of which 8% were major errors--that is, they prevented immediate identification of the source of the reference. Inaccurate quotations and citations are displeasing for the original author, misleading for the reader, and mean that untruths become 'accepted fact.'

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/bmj.291.6499.884

Cites

13 of 13 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

12 Own result · 8 Own interpretation · 5 Own method · 2 No basis given · 1 No full text of the sources

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 11
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 2
12 of 12
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The six selected journals are representative of medical journals generally.

    “Six journals were selected.They comprised three general medical journals (the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine); two specialist journals (Clinical Radiology and the British Journal ofSurgery); and a journal with a high proportion ofreview articles”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The first issue of each journal published during 1984 is representative of that journal's overall accuracy.

    “The first issue of each journal published during 1984 was obtained.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Unverifiable references would have contained errors if they could be verified.

    “It should be noted that the overall prevalence of errors we found is probably an underestimate, as all the journals contained some references that could not be verified (table ).”
3 of 3

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 17 references

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Place F. Verify your references: a word to medical writers. New York Medical Journal 1916;104:697-9.
  2. Dobell C. Dr 0 Uplavici (1887-1938). Parasitology 1938;30:23941.
  3. Journal, "Pain in the ear-a presenting symptom of aortic dissection," which pointed out that the auricular nerve was a branch of the vagus. I2 My patient's gastrointestinal troubles were possibly due to implication of this nerve. Before dissection he used to talk of his wandering "hemicrania," but when no explanation could be found he began to suspect his doctors believed he was getting neurotic. Now, however, after hearing of theBMJ reports, he thinks that there should be some type of medical enigma machine to decode such a gallimaufry of symptoms as he has presented.-L S LEWIS, general practitioner, Wales.
  4. BrewsterMF. Pain intheear-apresentingsymptom ofaorticdissection. BrMedJ 1985;290: 1517.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 162

Metadata

Authors
de Lacey, G., Record, C., & Wade, J.
Affiliations
University of Auckland (NZ)
Venue
BMJ
Publisher
BMJ
Published
1985-09-28
Volume
291
Issue
6499
Pages
884-886
ISSN
  • 0007-1447 (ISSN-L)
  • 0267-0623
  • 1468-5833
OpenAlex
W2009777888
Cited by
160
References
17
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 1
FWCI
48.61
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • BMJ (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
Medical Research Council
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Academic Writing and Publishing
  • Social Sciences › Library and Information Sciences › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
  • Social Sciences › Education › Academic integrity and plagiarism
Keywords
quotation errors, citation errors, medical journals, citation accuracy, misquotation, scientific integrity, editorial quality control
MeSH terms
Information Services, Periodicals as Topic, Publishing

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-11, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-11 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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