Examining the inaccuracies of citations and referencing: A case of a computer science and engineering journal

Citations and referencing accuracy play a crucial role for readers. The aim of this study was to analyse inaccuracies of citations and referencing in the international journal of computer science and engineering published in 2015 (volume no. 7, issue nos. 1–12). This study was an experiment-based and results revealed that referencing errors of volume 7 in issue no. 1 has the highest error rate of 5% and on the other hand, issue nos. 6 and 8 have the lowest error rate of 1.4%. Similarly, in the issue no. 2, error rate is 2.5%; issue nos. 3 and 4, error rate are 2.3%; issue no. 5, error rate is 2.5%; issue no. 7, error rate is 1.7%; issue no. 9, error rate is 1.5%; issue no. 10, error rate is 3.1%; issue no. 11 and 12, error rate are 3% and 1.7% respectively. However, the results also shown that citation errors in volume 7 for the issue nos. 3, 5, 7, and 12 do not have any errors, nevertheless, issue no. 4 has the highest error rate of 3.7%, followed by 3.6% (issue no. 9), 1.3% (issue nos. 1, 6, and 11), 1.2% (issue no. 8), and 1.1% (issue no. 2). This study recommends for academics and researchers to use reference management software tools, namely, EndNote, Mendeley, RefWorks, etc. to avoid errors and redundancy in order to make more accurate citations and referencing than manual systems.