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In a previous editorial, Onwuegbuzie, Frels, and Slate (2010) determined that citation errors (representing a failure "to make certain that each source referenced appears in both places [text and reference list] and that the text citation and reference list entry are identical in spelling of author names and year"; American Psychological Association [APA], 2010, p. 174) were committed by 91.8% of the authors who submitted manuscripts for review for publication to Research in the Schools. In a follow-up editorial, Onwuegbuzie, Combs, Frels, and Slate (2011) similarly documented a citation error rate of 88.6% among manuscripts submitted for review for publication to Educational Researcher, the highest ranked educational journal. Thus, citation errors currently represent the most prevalent APA error. However, to date, no researcher has examined APA style errors made in reference lists in manuscripts submitted to journals. In this editorial, we provide evidence-based guidelines to help authors avoid committing style errors in reference lists. Specifically, we present the results of a mixed analysis of 131 manuscripts submitted to Research in the Schools over a 6-year period, which revealed that authors committed more than 12 reference list errors per manuscript, on average (M = 12.83, SD = 7.25). Further, a total of 466 unique reference list errors were identified, which yielded 14 reference list error themes. Consequently, we provide an evidence-based practice exercise for reducing reference list errors. We hope that the tools and strategies we provide will help authors to prevent reference list errors in the future.
Reference lists appear in every scholarly work, regardless of genre (e.g., book, journal article, presentation) and regardless of writing style. In a previous editorial, Onwuegbuzie, Combs, Slate, and Frels (2010) discussed the findings of Onwuegbuzie and Combs (2009), who documented the 60 most common American Psychological Association (APA) errors occurring in 110 manuscripts that were submitted for review for publication to Research in the School (RITS), a nationally refereed journal and the flagship journal of the Mid-South Educational Research Association, over a 6-year period. Of the 60 APA errors that were identified, the incorrect use of numbers was the most common error-occurring in 57.3% of the manuscripts, which, as concluded by Onwuegbuzie et al. (2010), represents an extremely large effect size. In a subsequent editorial, Onwuegbuzie,...