Writing for “internal orthopaedics”: referencing quality citations

Excerpt

Writing a scientific paper is a fantastic job with strict rules and principles [1, 2]. In scientific writing, referencing (citation) is the information that is necessary to the reader to acknowledge, identify and trace the sources used in the study. It is the practice to acknowledge that the information is derived from an external source; failure to reference others’ academic work is a serious offence and a fraud in scientific writing. It is a respect to the original author or researcher and avoids claims of plagiarism [3‐5]. The word citation is defined as “an act of quoting” that is “to speak or write from another usually with credit acknowledgment” [6]. Referencing should be employed when using direct quotations and when paraphrasing or summarizing published text. It helps the authors put their work in the context of the related literature, to acknowledge and give credit to others’ work, to contextualize study findings, to distinguish an author’s ideas from others, to direct readers to original sources of information and to avoid plagiarism [7, 8]. It helps the readers to understand the work, to justify the conclusions, to judge the novelty and scope of the manuscripts, to critically evaluate what contribution the study makes and to source further information on the research and health topics [7‐9]. Referencing must be accurate, complete and consistently applied, as per the journal’s instructions; however, the most important challenge of referencing is the selection of sources for citation. The large number of publications on a topic makes this selection difficult [10‐15]. Additionally, “…the whole process of citing references is very idiosyncratic and a reflection of author biases…” [16]. …