Citing and referencing habits in Medicine and Social Sciences journals in 2019

TL;DR

This study analyzes citing and referencing habits in Medicine and Social Sciences journals from 2019, highlighting issues with current reference styles and proposing future trends based on FRBR concepts to improve bibliographic metadata.

Contribution

It expands previous research by applying FRBR Entity concepts to analyze referencing habits and suggests improvements for bibliographic metadata description.

Findings

Reference styles often do not fully guide proper metadata structure.

Trends indicate a move towards more descriptive and structured bibliographic references.

Future research should include more disciplines and time periods.

Abstract

This article explores citing and referencing systems in Social Sciences and Medicine articles from different theoretical and practical perspectives, considering bibliographic references as a facet of descriptive representation. The analysis of citing and referencing elements (i.e. bibliographic references, mentions, quotations, and respective in-text reference pointers) identified citing and referencing habits within disciplines under consideration and errors occurring over the long term as stated by previous studies now expanded. Future expected trends of information retrieval from bibliographic metadata was gathered by approaching these referencing elements from the FRBR Entities concepts. Reference styles do not fully accomplish with their role of guiding authors and publishers on providing concise and well-structured bibliographic metadata within bibliographic references. Trends on representative description revision suggest a predicted distancing on the ways information is approached by bibliographic references and bibliographic catalogs adopting FRBR concepts, including the description levels adopted by each of them under the perspective of the FRBR Entities concept. This study was based on a subset of Medicine and Social Sciences articles published in 2019 and, therefore, it may not be taken as a final and broad coverage. Future studies expanding these approaches to other disciplines and chronological periods are encouraged. By approaching citing and referencing issues as descriptive representation's facets, findings on this study may encourage further studies that will support Information Science and Computer Science on providing tools to become bibliographic metadata description simpler, better structured and more efficient facing the revision of descriptive representation actually in progress.