Suchergebnisse

Objective:The study's purpose was to answer two research questions: (1) In
the opinion of social work journal editors, how important is reference list accuracy?
and (2)Who is primarily responsible for the accuracy of reference lists published in
social work journals? Method: A sample of 119 authors and 26 journal editors was
surveyed to ascertain their views on the above questions and additional items.
Results: Regarding the importance of reference list accuracy, editors' responses
(Likert scale) averaged between moderately and extremely important. Fifty-three
percent of responding editors and 36.5% of authors reported that responsibility is
shared between the editor/staff and manuscript authors; the remaining 47% and
63.5%, respectively, responded that responsibility falls upon manuscript authors.
Responses from authors, mostly educators, revealed a greater-than-moderate
importance (Likert scale) given to instructing students on the accurate construction
of reference lists. Implications for social work education and journal publishing are
discussed.

This exploratory study investigated the rate of citation errors in the reference lists of five social work journals. High error rates have been found in journals in fields such as medicine and psychology but have not yet been investigated in social work journals. A stratified, computer-generated random sample was selected (N = 500, 100 per journal), and each reference was verified against the original work for accuracy in six fields: article title, author name(s), journal title, pagination, volume, and year. In examining the total sample of 500 references across the five journals, 206 references (41.2%) contained at least one error. Suggestions for reduction of error rates are discussed, as are suggestions for future study in this area.