Coercive citation
Coercive citation is an academic publishing practice in which an editor of a scientific or academic journal forces an author to add spurious citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it. This is done to inflate the journal's impact factor, thus artificially boosting the journal's scientific reputation. Manipulation of impact factors and self-citation has long been frowned upon in academic circles;[1] however, the results of a 2012 survey indicate that about 20% of academics working in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines have experienced coercive citation.[2] Individual cases have also been reported in other disciplines.[3]
When an author submits a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal, the editor may request that the article's citations be expanded before it will be published. This is part of the standard peer review process and meant to improve the paper.
Coercive citation, on the other hand, is a specific unethical business practice in which the editor asks the author to add citations to papers published in the very same journal (self-citation) and in particular to cite papers that the author regards as duplicate or irrelevant.[5] Specifically, the term refers to requests which:[2]
In one incident, which has been cited as a particularly blatant example of coercive citation, a journal editor wrote: "you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article".[3][2]
Such a request would convey a clear message to authors: "add citations or risk rejection."[2]
The effect of coercive citation is to artificially increase the journal's impact factor. Self-citation can have an appreciable effect: for example, in a published analysis, one journal's impact factor dropped from 2.731 to 0.748 when the self-citations were removed from consideration.[7] It is important to note that not all self-citation is coercive, or indeed improper.
The practice of coercive citation is risky, as it may damage the reputation of the journal, and it hence has the potential of actually reducing the impact factor. Journals also risk temporary exclusion from Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports, an influential list of impact factors, for such practices.[5]