How accurate are cited references in Iranian peer-reviewed journals?

The references cited in scientific articles are as important as any other part of the paper, because of their usefulness to the scientific community and to abstracting and indexing services and citation databases. I studied inaccuracies in references and in-text citations in sample of 97 of the 519 peer-reviewed journals accredited by the Iranian National Commission for Journal Accreditation Policy (Ministry of Research, Science and Technology). The target journals published 2,980 articles with 74,577 cited references and 108,151 in-text citations. The results showed 36.6% as the average percentage error rate (range 5.6% to 61.3%). The mean number of errors in cited reference and in-text citations was 2.7 per article, and the mean number of errors per journal was 690. For the entire sample of articles, 4,369 in-text citations did not match any source in the list of references (4%), and 8,683 cited references did not match any in-text citation (11.6%). The stakeholders in scholarly communication, especially authors, pay insufficient attention to the accuracy of bibliographic references. Peer-reviewed journals should encourage the use of standardized journal policies and quality-control measures regarding peer review, data quality and accuracy.