Sir

Coping with the multitude of formats imposed by academic journals for citing references to the literature is an aggravating and labour-intensive experience. Some of this staggering profusion of styles can be reasonably rationalized, for example the financial imperatives for saving space. But, as editor-in-chief of DNA Repair, I find that my discussions with the managing editors and publishers of several prominent scientific journals reveal little else by way of rational decisions.

What difference can it possibly make if an author's initials are placed before or after his/her surname, or where exactly in the citation the date of a publication is situated— not to mention the myriad variations of required fonts, italics, colons, commas and full stops? And does it really make a material difference whether references are arranged by author name (alphabetically or not) or numerically, and are identified in the text by number (which may be required in superscript or not) or by author name(s)?

The prevailing attitude seems to be that we are irrevocably stuck with this state of affairs and that trying to obtain consensus among editors and publishers to adopt a universal format would be like herding mosquitoes.

This letter is by way of an appeal to the publishers and editors of major scientific periodicals to agree on a single-standard reference format. Such an initiative would, I hope, go a long way to cajoling the remaining mosquitoes to join the herd. Exactly what this format should be is outside the province of this missive. But I doubt if many would disagree that a useful and sensible method would be to list references in alphabetical order, including only the first three author names, the entire article title, the journal name, the volume number, the first page number, and the publication year.

In recent years, computer programs have been designed to facilitate the management of varying reference styles. However, these are far from perfect, and I am informed by one prominent journal that staff members are routinely obliged to correct these in order to ensure conformity to the journal's required style. Furthermore, some of these programs use a series of macros that can interfere with the typesetting programs used by publishers.

With the advent of electronic publishing, additional problems have surfaced. A consortium representing many of the leading academic publishers has established an electronic articl- linking system in which articles are assigned a unique and irrevocable digital object identifier (doi). The doi consists of a unique alpha-numeric character string that is assigned to an article by the publisher at the time of electronic publishing. Aside from the fact that there is no uniform style for citing a doi, many identifiers do not even clearly identify the journal of origin.

I find it nothing short of pathetic that the scientific community has endured this seemingly arbitrary imposition for so long!