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Although references to review articles can be an efficient way to guide readers to a body of literature, review articles do not always accurately reflect the original work. Therefore, if possible, the author should provide the direct reference to original research sources. On the other hand, long lists of references to original works on a topic can use excessive printing space. A smaller number of references to key original papers are better than extensive lists, especially because references can now be added to the electronic version of published papers. Electronic literature searching allows readers to retrieve published literature efficiently.Avoid using abstracts as references. References to papers accepted but not yet published should be referred to as "in press" or "forthcoming"; authors should obtain written permission to cite such papers and confirm that they have been accepted for publication. Information from manuscripts that have been submitted and not accepted should be cited in the text as "unpublished observations", with a written permission from the source.Avoid citing a "personal communication" unless it provides essential information that is not available from a public source, in which case the name of the person and date of the communication should be cited in parentheses in the text. For scientific articles, authors should obtain written permission and confirmation of accuracy from the source of a personal communication.Some journals do and others do not check the accuracy of all reference citations, and citation errors sometimes appear in the published version of articles. To minimize such errors, the authors must confirm the references against the original documents.