An analysis of citing and referencing habits across all scholarly disciplines: approaches and trends in bibliographic metadata errors

Considering citing and referencing as facilitators of scientific communication and information retrieving; as providers of metadata which support searches in bibliographic catalogs and, as facets of descriptive representation, the discussion expands previous approaches concerning errors in bibliographic metadata, based on the analysis of reference elements, i.e. bibliographic references, mentions, quotations, and respective in-text reference pointers, from current articles of journals across the 27 subject areas composing SCImago Journal & Country Rank. The findings pointed that bibliographic errors have perpetuated for decades and, insofar as information supports other than printed documents become more popular among the scientific community, bibliographic errors and their possible causes have increased, despite the encouraged use of technological facilities, i.e. the reference managers. The results also suggested a trend of distancing among representative description facets, i.e., citing, referencing and cataloging, since the revision being carried within the representative description, which culminated on the publication of the conceptual models FRBR and IFLA-lRM, do not consider citing and referencing matters.