A scoping review of guides and advice for scholarly citing in health research

To identify, summarise and analyse documents with guides and advice for scholarly citing in health research.

In a scoping review, we included documents with guides and advice for scholarly citing in health research. We searched in Embase (Ovid), Google Scholar, 20 textbooks, 30 journal websites, and conducted supplementary searches. We categorised original documents as guides if their primary focus was on scholarly citing and if they contained a list of advice. We summarised the guides and pieces of advice, analysed the pieces of advice, and listed illustrative quotes.

We screened 9.746 documents for eligibility and included 118. The documents were published in 1934-2025, and the guides and advice were primarily identified in journal articles (63 out of 118 documents, 53%) and on websites (42 out of 118 documents, 36%). We identified 12 guides and 75 unique pieces of advice (e.g., "read the papers you cite"). The 12 guides were developed with a simple pragmatic approach, i.e., no systematic literature review of previous studies, and only one guide included a survey as a supporting study. The various pieces of advice were related to seven categories that researchers could reflect on while citing: 1) quality, 2) context, 3) when to cite, 4) integrity, 5) originality, 6) transparency, and 7) availability.

We identified 12 guides and 75 unique pieces of advice for scholarly citing in health research. Our review may serve as a resource for authors of health research publications and as part of the development process for a comprehensive guideline for adequate citation practice in health research.