Am I the only one who finds the reference system on online submission systems like Manuscript Central a little confusing? An example:

Today I uploaded the juicy bulk of my PhD findings to a prestigious journal. I’d gone through all my references manually to make sure they matched up with the journal’s style (because RefMan lies!). Then it came time to proof my manuscript in HTML to see if the references linked to Pubmed properly. I would guess half of them refused to link properly. So, I painstakingly went through and looked up all of the dead links on pubmed. Sure enough, there they were, just as I’d entered them in the manuscript. So what gives?

The main problem is a.) they don’t show you how the system parses references to assign strings to different search parameters (whoa I geeked out there for a second, sorry), and b.) if the link doesn’t work there’s no feedback as to why and c.) there’s no tolerance built in to the system.

Now I bashed away at it for a good hour this morning and when I couldn’t get it all perfect I just submitted it and hoped for the best. But I think I can imagine what’s going on. Authors are trying and failing to get the automatic references to work. Referees get annoyed that the authors “haven’t bothered” to do their references properly. The editorial staff have to go around manually fiddling with the references at great labour. Everyone ends up a little bit less happy.