One More Year To Remember
Dan Lukiv

august 1

her skis point upwards
behind the snorting blue boat--
she won’t say “go!”

august 2

poet in a lawn chair,
sleeping, pen in hand,
mouth open

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Bibliographic Errors in Articles Submitted to Scholarly Journals: The Case for Research in the Schools
Qun G. Jiao
Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie
Vicki L. Waytowich

Articles published in scientific journals normally contain a list of references. The list of references serves a number of important scholarly functions. It provides credibility and support for the author’s statements, access to background information pertaining to the topic of interest, and a resource for the reader to find additional literature on the topic (Wyles, 2004). Readers of journal articles can follow up a cited reference to further their knowledge of existing research, to track down other related material, or to verify the assertions and claims made by the authors (Waytowich, Onwuegbuzie, & Jiao, 2006). To easily retrieve the cited works, it is essential that the references be accurate. Inaccurate references reflect poorly on the authors, devaluate the credibility of the article and the journal in which it appears, and also hinder the search for additional sources of related literature (Lok, Chan, & Martinson, 2001). Bibliographic errors in references can make it difficult for the reader to retrieve the cited works and to obtain, check, or verify information to which the text of a paper refers. Errors such as misspelled titles and author names could conceivably have the consequence of preventing important works from being retrieved, consulted, and recognized (Garfield, 1990). Certain errors such as incorrect publication year, volume, or page number make it particularly difficult to locate the cited work and to complete a bibliographic database search because the computer will not recognize an error or a misspelled name. Thus, reference errors can be a source of great frustration on the part of readers.

Yet, errors in bibliographic citations are not recent problems. Citation errors can be traced back more than 100 years (Sweetland, 1989). The classic example of the bibliographic error is the 1887 Czech article written by Jaroslav Hlava, entitled “O uplavici”, which means “on dysentery” (Sassen, 1992). A German abstract later published the author’s name as O. Uplavici, consequently beginning 50 years of miscitations, culminating in 1938 as a result of research by Clifford Dobell (Sweetland, 1989). Even with the publication of various style manuals to guide the preparation of bibliographic citations, such as the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago Manual, 2003), the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2001), and the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Gibaldi, 2003), “citation errors continued to appear, as did an increasing number of complaints about them” (Sweetland, 1989, p. 293). In recent years, several studies have examined the bibliographic accuracy of citations.  These studies analyzed different types of citation errors in selected journals for a fixed time period to determine the prevalence of the bibliographic errors in these journals. The results have shown a high rate of errors ranging from 8% to 66.7%, with as many as 6% of the original articles being irretrievable (de Lacey, Record, & Wade 1985; Nishina, Asano, Mikawa, Maekawa, & Obara, 1995; Ngan Kee, Roach, & Lau, 1997; Roach, Lau, & Kee, 1997; Siebers, 2000; Siebers & Holt, 2000; Gosling, Cameron, & Gibbons, 2004).

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