background The prevalence of errors in reference citations in the psychiatric literature is not as well documented as in other medical fields. We don't know of any research on this topic in our language field.

aim To determine the number of errors in accuracy and appropriateness in the 'Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie'.

method One hundred randomly selected references from three issues of the 'Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie' were examined for accuracy and appropriateness by validating them against the original sources.

results Fourty-two references had errors, the most common being minor errors in accuracy. Still, we found ten major errors in accuracy that delayed access to the original articles. Of fifteen errors in the appropriateness of references, three were judged as major.

conclusions References in the 'Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie' contain (too) many errors. It seems important to try and remediate this problem.