Improvement in the accuracy of references in the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia.

OBJECTIVE: To study any change in reference accuracy in the Australasian emergency medicine journal (now known as Emergency Medicine Australasia), in the 10 years since a previous analysis was undertaken.

METHOD: A sample of 100 randomly selected references was compared with the results from the previous analysis.

RESULTS: There was a significant reduction in the number of citations with errors and in the total number of errors.

CONCLUSION: This paper demonstrates a significant improvement in the accuracy of references in the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia over the past decade. This paper did not identify the reasons for this improvement, but potential causes might include the introduction of a web-based peer review and manuscript submission process, as well as improved reference bibliography systems by authors. In addition, an increase in the overall standard of paper submitted to the journal might have contributed to this improvement.