Arrogant misquotations from reference citations

It is very easy to fi nd medical references these days, as computers are now in general use and we appreciate the endless benefi ts that they bring. In earlier times, though, perhaps as recently as 10 years ago, one had to work very hard searching for references using the " List of Journals Indexed for the Japan Medical Abstracts Society Database, " printed and published periodically. However, at least we were able to read the original medical research papers. Nowadays, I rarely come across reports that make me believe authors have actually read the " original " papers they are citing, published some time in the past. I think this is attributable to the ease with which references can be found now. These reports citing previous papers seem to lack the necessary depth, and when reading them one often receives the impression that the authors are trying to imply that they performed the original research themselves. Therefore, authors need to be more modest and acknowledge the fact that most human achievements have been built on a foundation laid by our predecessors; it cannot be said that similar research never existed in the past. As most cited references used in recent reports are found via the Internet, there can be some diffi culty in obtaining information about detailed research work relating to the year in which an original report was published. Finding this information requires a lot of time and much work, searching papers not only from the twentieth century, but sometimes also the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This appears to be why some people tend to plagiarize information from recent reports, pretending they have read the original papers, but often omitting important facts or cutting things short. This kind of sloppiness creates a great deal of misunderstanding and is a refl ection of the author's casual attitude. Figure 1 shows a list of cited references used by famous orthopedic surgeons from the United States in their reports, published in one of the leading American medical journals. It is clear that incorrect German and French words have been used. These incorrectly cited references formed the basis of the original research on the disease and the various methods of treating it. It is disappointing that such well-known surgeons in the United States should have misquoted these renowned German and French scientists and their pioneering work. I can only assume that the …