"We'll take your study. But could you, er... cite some articles in our journal please?"

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"We'll take your study. But could you, er... cite some articles in our journal please?"

This is an interesting new record of bad behaviour, driven by bibliometrics: academic journals, asking academic authors to cite papers from their own pages, in order to make that journal's impact factor look better. Worse than that, it happened at the fragile moment, where a paper's publication hangs in the balance. Grim!
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1538-7836.2011.04601.x/abstract

F. Avanzini et al., “Solicited Self‐Referencing Undermines the Credibility of Researchers and Journals,” Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis (n.d.)

Sirs,
We wish to draw the attention of the readership of this journal and of the scientific community at large to what recently happened to a colleague of ours. The letter accompanying the editor’s request for major revision of a manuscript included the following surprising advice: “The Editors would also greatly appreciate you adding more than two but fewer than six references of articles published in [the Journal involved], above all articles published over the past two years.” A rapid survey among a few colleagues told us that this type of editorial policy is not as exceptional as one might believe. Another editor conveyed the same message to a prospective author: “We would like to emphasize that we attach great importance to cross referencing very recent material on the same topic in [this journal]. Therefore, it would be highly appreciated if you would check the last 2 years of [the same Journal] and add all material relevant to your article to the reference list”.
... It is likely that the forementioned editors’ requests for self-citation of articles published in the previous two years was meant to increase the number of citations and hence inflate the impact factors of their journals.
While it is legitimate that a scientific journal is pleased to see its impact factor raising as a consequence of the increased recognition of its published articles, it is obviously unacceptable for the increase to be artificially triggered through the practice of soliciting self-citations. If this kind of requests from editors spreads, prospective authors may soon feel obliged to refer to articles from the journal to which they are submitting their work, even when citations are unnecessary or irrelevant. With time this may become a custom and a way to capture the benevolence of editors, though not serving scientific merits and aims.

More behind the jump (£).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1538-7836.2011.04601.x/abstract
More on impact factors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
- 16 January 2012
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4 months ago majikthijs responded:

I know the editor of a journal for a respectable materials science journal who automatically refuses an article if 'their' journal is not cited in the first three references on the grounds that such an article probably won't fit in with the style or metier of the journal in question. Considering the quite specific content of the journal, I can't say I entirely disagree with this approach.

4 months ago majikthijs responded:

That is to say, comparing an article to the content of the relevant journal on the basis of citation; not the wholsesale promotion of self-citing.

4 months ago EndoMetabPub (Twitter) responded:

This is simply an unacceptable practice and the guilty journals should be named and shamed.

4 months ago joelphillips responded:

Doug Arnold has interesting things to say about this, e.g.
http://www.siam.org/news/news.php?id=1663

4 months ago BobOHara (Twitter) responded:

This has been happening for several years, in different journals.
The good news is that most people find this pretty scummy, so they're not likely to submit to that journal again.

4 months ago BrianSMcGowan (Twitter) responded:

what does it say about the culture of publishing in general that any journal could put such a policy in writing - one might imagine an editor's meeting where several folks all agreed that this was somehow in the best interest of science?

4 months ago brembs (Twitter) responded:

You may want to have a look at this post for references and direct evidence to worse manipulations: http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n817.html

4 months ago leftvision responded:

Greetings, I was jusr browsing this and frankly, it sounds made up. First of all, why isn't the "Journal" in question mentioned by name? Sounds like the "anonymous" White House sources that spread unfounded rumours to me. Second, no serious Editor would EVER put something like this in writing.
So, perhaps it is some obscure and cheesy journal in Uganda, with brainless and corrupt n00b Editors. Certainly, it is not one of the average journals I read and review for.
Sincerely,
Giacomo Galilei

4 months ago thejoeturner (Twitter) responded:

Seems to me that most papers are in subjects that are such specialist areas that the reviewers are highly likely to be competing academics. Hard to prove, but one can imagine that if the paper does not include citations from the reviewer's papers, it might not be accepted.

4 months ago majikthijs responded:

ok, there's a world of difference between making sure a paper fits within the remit of a particular journal and just pure abuse of the system for personal gain. To reply to thejoeturner, all the papers I review are anonymous ie the authors don't know who is doing the review either before or afterwards, so that rules out the mutual backscratching argument.
Further if you want to get a paper in nature then it's probably going to need to appeal to a wide audience and be fairly groundbreaking. on the other hand if you want to get published in Wear, then you'll need to be focused on some aspect of tribology. Not surprisingly, in both cases you'll probably need to be fairly up to date with publications in these journals, so a reference to a relevant paper might not be out of place.

4 months ago joe dunckley responded:

This is old news. You're familiar with the story of the World Journal of Gastroenterology?
"Self-citation can go too far. In 2005, Thomson Scientific dropped the World Journal of Gastroenterology from its rankings because 85% of the citations it published were to its own papers and because few other journals cited it."
When I was an editor I encountered a reviewer who gave an otherwise bland review, but who advised that the autors must cite 34 (!) additional articles. On all of them he was an author, and very few, if any, were relevant enough.

4 months ago Matthew Salter liked this post.

4 months ago muscleguy responded:

@Majikthijs
That sounds to me like an ad hoc means of screening without exerting oneself. A former Editor of a major journal I used to work for in his lab was dismissive of anyone he had never heard of. It was self evidently obvious to him that if he, in his obviously exalted status, had not heard of the authors then the work could not be any good. Journal club in that lab could therefore be a bit fraught, since you didn't know who he knew if you chose a paper from someone he didn't know . . . Mind you I learned a great deal about how to critique a paper properly from him, once he decided it deserved the effort of course. I wish this attitude was rare amongst senior scientists, but I'm afraid it is not.
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