Female scientist looking tired reading risk report on computer

Pressure from editors to include extra citations is a frequent problem in scientific publishing, surveys suggest.LumiNola/Getty

Researchers who are coerced by editors into adding superfluous citations in their manuscripts are more likely to succeed in publishing papers than are those who resist, finds a study published in Research Policy1.

The paper focuses on 1,169 scholars who reported in a survey done in 2012 that they had been asked to add superfluous citations, of whom 1,043 complied, adding at least one citation.

When scientists are coerced into padding their papers with citations, the journal editor might be looking to boost either their journal’s or their own citation counts, says study author Eric Fong, who studies research management at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In other cases, peer reviewers might try to persuade authors to cite their work. Citation rings, in which multiple scholars or journals agree to cite each other excessively, can be harder to spot, because there are several stakeholders involved, instead of just two academics disproportionately citing one another.

Although the survey data were collected around a decade ago, the findings are just as relevant today and the situation is unlikely to have changed significantly, says Fong.

In previous work based on the 2012 survey, Fong and his Huntsville colleague Allen Wilhite found that one in five academics in various social science and business fields reported being asked to pad their papers with superfluous citations2. And in a 2017 survey by the same authors, women were less likely than men to be persuaded to add unjustifiable citations, but more likely to include honorary authors, potentially because of power dynamics between themselves and more senior colleagues3.

There are legitimate circumstances in which a peer reviewer or an editor might ask for a certain paper to be cited, particularly in fields with only a handful of researchers. “I think if a researcher is coerced, then they should seek the advice of trusted scholars and their supervisor,” Fong says. “If editors become aware that their coercive requests are being shared, maybe that would dissuade them from future coercion.”

Removing incentives

According to the latest study, researchers who agreed to comply fully with editors’ coercive requests had an acceptance rate of 85%, compared with 77% for those who complied only partially and 39% for those who refused to comply.

Researchers who cave to adding undeserved citations into their papers are likely to publish in the same journals in the future and to engage in citation manipulation repeatedly. More than 68% of researchers who weren’t coerced agreed that they would be less likely to submit to coercing journals in the future, compared with 47% of those who were coerced.

Fong says that one solution to the problem is that journal self-citations should be excluded from metrics such as the journal impact factor, which is sometimes misused to evaluate scientists and their work. That, he notes, would give journal editors fewer reasons to ask for more citations to other papers published in their title.

Matt Hodgkinson, research integrity manager at the UK Research Integrity Office in London and an elected council member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a UK-based non-profit organization, agrees. “If we want to reduce these distorting practices, then we have to take away the incentive to do them,” he says. “It’s a systemic corruption of the process.”

Hodgkinson says that editors who are making decisions on manuscripts on the basis of coercion are distorting the literature. “You’re making a decision on something that’s not a characteristic of the article itself.”

“I think there is still a lot of work to be done on educating individual journal editors,” Hodgkinson says. But, he adds, publishers and journals should actively monitor when peer reviewers or editors make citation requests.

Detecting and flagging

In February, a journal run by Dutch publishing giant Elsevier drew a lot of criticism after it stated in a rejection letter to the author of a manuscript that one of the reasons their paper was rejected was that they had not included enough citations of papers published in the journal. The case came to light after the rejection letter was circulated widely on social media.

At the time, Elsevier clarified that it had a clear policy on citation manipulation, which states that editors must not attempt to boost the journal rankings by artificially inflating any metrics.

The onus is on publishers to take action, Hodgkinson says. If they don’t, the community needs to respond and flag these issues to bodies such as COPE, which can provide oversight.

Jonathan Wren, a bioinformatician at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, contends that researchers who engage in citation manipulation should be named and shamed.

Wren is in the process of developing a tool that can automatically detect and flag excessive referencing between journals and individuals.