Are All the References Mentioned in Academic Papers? A Quantitative Analysis of the Nonmentioned Phenomenon

Abstract The nonmentioned phenomenon is when citations or references are missing from the body of the paper, and the phenomenon may be abnormal citing behavior that results from the negligence of the author or editor. Therefore, this study selected 40 journals in five different disciplines and carried out a comparative study. The research methods employed in this study were multivariate statistical analysis and similarity calculations. The results show that 3.45% of papers included the nonmentioned phenomenon and that the similarity between nonmentioned references and the cited paper are so low as to disqualify part of the nonmentioned references. Further, since the nonmentioned phenomenon did not appear in 96.55% of papers, it can be concluded that although most of the papers are consistent with citation normativeness, the nonmentioned phenomenon does exist in scientific papers. This study provides evidence to suggest that the nonmentioned phenomenon should receive more attention in the academic world.