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

Purpose. In this study, we want to identify what are current possible causes for citing and referencing errors in scholarly literature to compare if something changed from the snapshot provided Sweetland in his 1989 paper. Design/methodology/approach. We analysed reference elements, i.e. bibliographic references, mentions, quotations, and respective in-text reference pointers, from 729 articles published in 147 journals across the 27 subject areas. Findings. The outcomes of our analysis pointed out that bibliographic errors have been perpetuated for decades and that their possible causes have increased, despite the encouraged use of technological facilities, i.e., the reference managers. Originality. As far as we know, our study is the best recent available analysis of errors in referencing and citing practices in the literature since Sweetland (1989).