From “General Background” to Verifiability: Editorial Requirements for the Reference List in Research Articles

Introduction: In scholarly research, the reference list serves not an auxiliary but an evidential function: citations to prior studies are the primary means by which readers can verify the grounds for a study design, analytical procedures, regulatory safety criteria, and the interpretation of results. A disconnect between an article’s claims and its cited sources, caused by irrelevant citations and the artificial inflation of reference lists, undermines both research reproducibility and trust in scientific knowledge.

Purpose: To provide authors with a practice-oriented standard for working with scholarly sources that ensures the traceability of argumentation and the verifiability of key research claims.

Results: The article synthesizes international publication-ethics requirements and editorial guidance on citation accuracy and authors’ accountability for ensuring that references substantively support the statements to which they are attached. It proposes applied rules and self-check procedures for assessing the functionality and relevance of cited sources, aligned with the typical rhetorical nodes of a technological manuscript (problem framing, methodological justification, results interpretation, conclusions, and practical recommendations). The paper advances the principle that every strong claim must be supported by a verifiable source and operationalizes it for technology-oriented articles through: (1) functional linking of citations to claims that determine reproducibility (processing regimes, process parameters, analytical methods, and safety/quality criteria); (2) a clear distinction between acceptable review citations used to document consensus and mandatory primary sources for numerical regimes, methods, and regulatory requirements; (3) a list of typical citation problems in studies on storage and processing of raw agricultural materials (substituting a primary source with a review, transferring parameters across non-comparable matrices, citing regulations without the current version, and “chain-citing” methods); (4) a pre-submission reference-audit protocol that verifies whether the source has been read, whether the claim–source match is semantically accurate, and whether the citation is functionally necessary; and (5) recommendations for post-publication correction of identified bibliographic errors through contacting the editorial office.

Conclusion: The proposed framework shifts source work from a formal “formatting” step to a research quality-control procedure. Its application reduces the risk of irrelevant citations and bibliographic negligence, increases the transparency of technological decisions, and strengthens the reproducibility of results as an essential requirement for applied research in the storage and processing of raw agricultural materials.

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