Indian Journal of Surgery Medknow Publications on behalf of Association of Surgeons of India ISSN: 0972-2068 Vol. 65, Num. 3, 2003, pp. 290-291

Indian Journal of Surgery, Vol. 65, No. 3, May-June, 2003, pp. 290-291

Letter to the Editor

Accuracy of references in the Indian Journal of Surgery: Comments

D. K. Sahu

Executive Editor, Indian Journal of Medical Sciences Mumbai, India. E-mail: dksahu@vsnl.com

Code Number: is03062
Read Related article - is03026

Sir,

I read with interest the article by Mohta and Mohta¹ on the accuracy of cited references in the Indian Journal of Surgery. At the outset I congratulate the authors for taking efforts and the Editor for publishing the article as a lead article in the journal. Through this letter, I would like to draw attention to certain aspects of the study.

For the confirmation of the accuracy of the cited references, it is important to verify all the references from a printed source as well as MEDLINE or some other electronic source. A check with one source only is likely to give erroneous results. If only the printed source is checked, it is possible to miss out errata related to names of authors published at a later date (e.g. this issue of the journal has a similar erratum). In addition, as suggested by the authors, often it is difficult to decide the correct initials and last name from the printed articles. On the other hand, checking only MEDLINE is likely to give equally flawed results. Until recently, the entries in the MEDLINE database were done manually, hence the possibility of errors generated at that level cannot be ruled out. For example, the name in one of the references cited by the authors is different in MEDLINE and the printed version (e.g. Kee WD in MEDLINE for reference 5 given by the authors, which actually is Ngan Kee WD). It has been shown that there are errors in spelling and other records in MEDLINE.² Occasionally, names of group authors are not correctly cited in MEDLINE.³ Similar problems are seen with authors from countries where the names contain special characters.⁴ For these reasons it was important that the authors should have verified all the references from both the print and electronic sources.

Authors classified the errors as major and minor based on the effect of the error on the retrievability of the reference. It is incorrect to say that an error in any one of the six items (missing authors, incorrect first author, incorrect journal title, incorrect article title, wrong number of the volume or year of publication and wrong first page number) makes a reference irretrievable. With the National Library of Medicine's `Citation matcher for single articles' (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/citmatch.html) one can search for references with ease and usually journal title, year or volume and first page numbers are sufficient to find a reference. Authors' name(s) and article title are not mandatory. Hence the criterion used by the authors for the classification of major and minor errors is not reasonable.

I would like to suggest more ways to improve the referencing, apart from the suggestions made by the authors. While submitting a manuscript authors could write PubMed ID (PMID) at the end of the cited reference. This will ensure that the reference is retrievable irrespective of an error in other part(s) of the reference. Use of proprietary citation tools (e.g. EndNote or Reference Manager) is something missing with most Indian authors. Use of such software allows easy referencing with minimum chances of errors. Institutions should take the initiative for getting an institutional license to enable all the members of the institution benefit from these tools.

D. K. Sahu

Executive Editor, Indian Journal of Medical Sciences

Mumbai, India. E-mail: dksahu@vsnl.com

REFERENCES

1. Mohta A, Mohta M. Accuracy of references in Indian Journal of Surgery. Indian J Surg 2003;65:156-8.
2. De S, Jones T, Brazier H, Jones AS, Fenton JE. The accuracy of MEDLINE and Journal contents pages for papers published in Clinical Otolaryngology. Clin Otolaryngol 2001; 26:39-42. [Abstract]
3. Dickersin K, Scherer R, Suci ES, Gil-Montero M. Problems with indexing and citation of articles with group authorship. JAMA 2002;287:2772-4.
4. Ruiz-Perez R, Delgado Lopez-Cozar E, Jimenez-Contreras E. Spanish personal name variations in national and international biomedical databases: implications for information retrieval and bibliometric studies. J Med Libr Assoc 2002;90:411-30.

REPLY BY THE AUTHORS

We thank Dr Sahu for appreciation of the paper and his comments. We would like to submit as following:

We believe that checking the reference from the original publication should be considered as gold standard for verification. It is very uncommon to have an error in the original publication. At the same time we submit that for the study, verification was done from both electronic media and original publication as far as possible. The original publication was the only source of verification in cases of non-indexed Journals and articles from indexed Journals prior to PUBMED cut-off year. Electronic media (PUBMED) alone were used only when the cited Journal was not available in the library.

The classification used for the type of errors is the most practical and has been used in similar studies.¹ Usually at the first attempt for finding a reference from PUBMED, one uses the first author's name. Although the utility of single citation matcher is unquestioned, it is mostly used only as a second line method when the first one fails to retrieve the article. So our viewpoint stands. Also the argument in favour of single citation matcher by the esteemed reader should not become an alibi for wrong referencing.

Anup Mohta, Medha Mohta*

Departments of Surgery and *Anaesthesiology, GTB Hospital and University College of Medical Sciences, New Delhi 110095

REFERENCE

1. Doms CA. A survey of reference accuracy in five national dental journals. J Dent Res 1989; 68:442-4.

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