This is corroborated by Research Trends’ own case study of citations and references for 10 journals that changed title in 2000. Anecdotal evidence gleaned through reference lists suggests that journal title changes can indeed lead to erroneous references from authors and a “loss” of citations by those indexing services matching citations to journal titles only, which may struggle to assign them to their intended source accurately.

Erroneous citations and references were found for all 10 journals that changed title in 2000; for most of them even in articles published in the journals themselves in years around the title change. For instance, a 1999 article from one title was correctly referenced as being published under the old journal title 30 times, but incorrectly referred to as being published under the new title 5 times. In another journal, one article even contained one correct reference to an article published under the old journal title three years prior to the change, but also one incorrect reference to an article as having been published under the new title, (despite the article in question having been published a full year prior to the title change).