Verify Your Citations: Accuracy of Reference Citations in Twelve Business and Economics Journals
Abstract
A total of 4,851 bibliographic reference citations from 12 business and economics journals were examined for accuracy to determine if error rates were similar to those of other fields. The journals selected were Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Econometrica, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Marketing, Journal ofRisk and Uncertainty, Quarterly Journal of Economics, mdStrategic Management Journal. Citations printed in the last issue of each journal in 1998 were compared with the original publications to determine their accuracy. An average of 41.7% of citations in the journals contained 1 or more errors. Most appeared in authors' names, followed by errors in pagination, followed by errors in article or chapter titles. of the 93 articles examined, only two had completely error-freee reference lists.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
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?
In O'Connor and Kristof (2001), 15.0% of verified references contained at least one error.
“Yes 15.0%Not reported Article title”
From Reference accuracy of primary studies published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals: A scoping review (2024) · cites this paper as O'Connor and Kristof (2001)
Cites
How accurate are quotations and references in medical journals?
de Lacey, G., Record, C., & Wade, J. (1985) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.291.6499.884 · Cited by 160 · see citing works
Eichorn, P., & Yankauer, A. (1987) · American Journal of Public Health · doi:10.2105/ajph.77.8.1011 · Cited by 114 · see citing works
Reference accuracy in the emergency medicine literature
Goldberg, R., Newton, E., Cameron, J., Jacobson, R., Chan, L., Bukata, W. R., & Rakab, A. (1993) · Annals of Emergency Medicine · doi:10.1016/s0196-0644(05)81995-x · Cited by 49 · see citing works
Reference accuracy in the dermatologic literature
George, P. M., & Robbins, K. (1994) · Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology · doi:10.1016/s0190-9622(94)70136-9 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
Accuracy of references in nursing journals
Foreman, M. D., & Kirchhoff, K. T. (1987) · Research in Nursing & Health · doi:10.1002/nur.4770100310 · Cited by 40 · see citing works
Accuracy of Published Medical Reference Citations
Goodrich, J. E., & Roland, C. G. (1977) · Journal of Technical Writing and Communication · doi:10.2190/2b2a-f34l-0txg-wnq7 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
Accuracy of references and quotations in veterinary journals
Hinchcliff, K. W., Bruce, N. J., Powers, J. D., & Kipp, M. L. (1993) · Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association · doi:10.2460/javma.1993.202.03.397 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Accuracy of References in<i>Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport</i>
Stull, G. A., Christina, R. W., & Quinn, S. A. (1991) · Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport · doi:10.1080/02701367.1991.10608720 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Citation accuracy in environmental science journals
Lopresti, R. (2010) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-010-0293-6 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Logan, S. W., Hussong-Christian, U., Case, L., & Noregaard, S. (2024) · Journal of Librarianship and Information Science · doi:10.1177/09610006231177715 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
- Authors
- O'Connor, L. G., & Kristof, C.
- Affiliations
- Kent State University (US)
- ORCID
- Kristof, Cindy
- Venue
- Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2001-06
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 23-40
- ISSN
- 0896-3568 (ISSN-L)
- 1547-0644
- OpenAlex
- W1506447351
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2023: 1 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Keywords
- citation errors, bibliographic references, citation verification, author name errors
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.
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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