Reference Accuracy Study
A reference accuracy study verifies the references in published work against their sources to estimate how often citations are wrong, distinguishing bibliographic errors (mistakes in author, title, year, volume, or pages) from quotation errors (cases where the cited source does not actually support the claim attributed to it). The method draws a sample of references, checks each one against the original document, and reports error rates as proportions with confidence intervals, often classifying errors by severity. Such studies have repeatedly found troubling rates: reviews of medical research, synthesized by Mogull (2017), put the quotation error rate near 14.5 percent, and Smith and Cumberledge (2020) found substantial quotation errors even in general science journals. For libraries and editors, these studies justify citation-checking services and reference-verification workflows.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Mogull, S. A. (2017). Accuracy of cited "facts" in medical research articles: A review of study methodology and recalculation of quotation error rate. PLOS ONE, 12(9), e0184727. · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0184727
- Smith, N., & Cumberledge, A. (2020). Quotation errors in general science journals. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 476(2242), 20200538. · DOI 10.1098/rspa.2020.0538
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.