Do authors check their references? A survey of 500 references from the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

From a systematic study of 500 references randomly selected in the January through July, 1992, issues of the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, it was found that 26% had errors. 6.2% of the referenced articles could not be found at all; either due to the fact that they were obscure foreign articles, their age made it difficult to verify, they cited non-peer reviewed journals, or the references cited journals that possibly did not exist. The remaining references were verified either from the original source or from other indexing tools if the original was not available.