The objective was to examine reference errors in research articles published in Research on Social Work Practice. High rates of reference errors in other top social work journals have been noted in previous studies.

Via a sampling frame of 22,177 total references among 464 research articles published in the previous decade, a sample of 500 references were randomly selected and verified against the original work for accuracy in the following fields: author name(s), publication year, article title, journal title, volume, and page number(s).

Almost 27% of references contained at least 1 error (0.35 errors per reference); 173 errors in total. The plurality of errors occurred in article titles (13.2%). Two factors significantly related to the likelihood of error: reference age and number of authors.

Comparison to reference error rates in other social work journals is discussed, as are suggestions to authors, editors, and educators regarding error reduction.