Abstract

BackgroundInaccurate citations are erroneous quotations or instances of paraphrasing of previously published material that mislead readers about the claims of the cited source. They are often unaddressed due to underreporting, the inability of peer reviewers and editors to detect them, and editors’ reluctance to publish corrections about them. In this paper, we propose a new tool that could be used to tackle their circulation.MethodsWe provide a review of available data about inaccurate citations and analytically explore current ways of reporting and dealing with these inaccuracies. Consequently, we make a distinction between publication (i.e., first occurrence) and circulation (i.e., reuse) of inaccurate citations. Sloppy reading of published items, literature ambiguity and insufficient quality control in the editorial process are identified as factors that contribute to the publication of inaccurate citations. However, reiteration or copy-pasting without checking the validity of citations, paralleled with lack of resources/motivation to report/correct inaccurate citations contribute to their circulation.Results and discussionWe propose the development of an online annotation tool called “MyCites” as means with which to mark and map inaccurate citations. This tool allows ORCID users to annotate citations and alert authors (of the cited and citing articles) and also editors of journals where inaccurate citations are published. Each marked citation would travel with the digital version of the document (persistent identifiers) and be visible on websites that host peer-reviewed articles (journals’ websites, Pubmed, etc.). In the future development of MyCites, challenges such as the conditions of correct/incorrect-ness and parties that should adjudicate that, and, the issue of dealing with incorrect reports need to be addressed.

Highlights

  • Within all areas of research, the use of previously published material is an essential building block of knowledge-production [1]

  • Inaccurate representations of previously published material can mislead readers about the claims of the cited source, and distract the accurate flow of information and history of ideas. This pertains not just to bibliographic errors such as spelling mistakes in authors’ names or an incorrect publication year, but to erroneous quotations and misleading paraphrases. While both bibliographic errors and misleading quotations/paraphrases are problematic, this paper only focuses on the latter issue and Hosseini et al Research Integrity and Peer Review

  • We propose and are piloting a new tool that consolidates annotation capabilities with persistent identifiers, as well as Open Citation Identifiers (OCI) [23] and In-Text Reference Pointer Identifier (InTRePID) [24], to simplify locating and marking in-text citations

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Within all areas of research, the use of previously published material is an essential building block of knowledge-production [1] This is so indispensable that, famously, Isaac Newton described the process of discovering the truth by relying on previous explorations as Inaccurate representations of previously published material can mislead readers about the claims of the cited source, and distract the accurate flow of information and history of ideas. This pertains not just to bibliographic errors such as spelling mistakes in authors’ names or an incorrect publication year, but to erroneous quotations and misleading paraphrases. We propose a new tool that could be used to tackle their circulation

Methods
Results
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call