engleski

Editors' impact on improving the accuracy of references: randomised comparison of standard practice, brief reminder or educational intervention

Objective: To investigate whether editors' intervention prompts authors to reduce the number of errors in references of manuscripts they submit for publication. Design: We randomly allocated 75 consecutive manuscripts accepted for publication in a general medical journal to one of three interventions. The Editor-in-chief returned manuscripts to the authors for final changes with a covering letter corresponding to the intervention group: standard practice (prompting authors to acknowledge required changes, with no specific mention of the references section), brief reminder (standard practice plus a sentence prompting authors to pay special attention to the accuracy of references) or educational intervention (standard practice plus a paragraph highlighting the importance of the accuracy of references and a copy of reference citation formats recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors). Blinded to the intervention, errors were classified as technical (e.g. punctuation) or substantive (e.g. misspelled author' s last name) compared with the Manuscript Editor's gold standard. Differences in the accuracy and rate of errors in revised manuscripts between standard practice and the other interventions were examined using logistic and Poisson regression. We adjusted for ICMJE reference format and errors in the original manuscript. The manuscripts were the unit of analysis and included as random effects. Results: We considered 2035 pairs of references after excluding 12 references deleted from original manuscripts and 79 added to revised manuscripts. The percentage of completely accurate references and references without technical and substantive errors in the original manuscripts were 14.9%, 30.1% and 42.7% respectively. Small but statistically significant improvements in completely accurate and technically correct references were observed in the educational intervention group compared with standard practice. These improvements were also better than in the brief reminder group (p=0.02 and p<0.01 respectively). No statistically significant differences were observed for improvement in substantive errors. Conclusion: Editors' educational intervention can produce small improvements in the accuracy of references as supplied by authors.

editors; references

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