While the authors of a new paper don’t use the term, peer reviewers suggesting authors include citations to irrelevant research is standover behaviour.
And there is enough of it about for Debra Z Basil, and colleagues in Australia to call for publishers to act on coercive citation requests.*
They surveyed management/marketing journal editors and assessed websites for information and advice on reviewers asking authors to add unmerited citations to find the majority did not mention the practise or have apparent ways to screen for it.
While Professor Basil and colleagues have no discipline-wide numbers, they suggest, “the practice is widespread” and “increased pressure on academics to have high citation accounts can create an unfortunate temptation.”
And authors, especially junior ones, may not have a whole of choice to reject dubious citation suggestions, “academics need to publish and the lure of acceptance of a manuscript that may have taken many months or years to develop may override authors concerns about any suggested changes.”
The problem is compounded by the separate problem of citation plagiarism, enough references to irrelevant work which are included in enough uncritically copy and pasted literature notes and an author’s H-index appears better than it is. Or as Basil et al puts it, “citations beget citations.”
But for now, “based on our sample, reviewers are rarely reminded that asking authors to cite their work could be considered a conflict of interest.”
So what is to be done? The authors suggest it is not an editors will address – peer reviewers are hard to find and prized when they are but the big-four journal publishers could act in concert through four interventions,
* educating reviewers about conflicts of interest
* an honour code on the same
* reviewers disclosing citations of their work in papers they recommended
* editors oversighting
But for now, “based on our sample, reviewers are rarely reminded that asking authors to cite their work could be considered a conflict of interest.”
It’s a problem, and part of a bigger one with the research publishing system overall – there’s a Facebook page dedicated to it – “Reviewer number two must be stopped.” It has 142 000 members.
* Debra Z Basil (Uni Lethbridge), Suzan Burton (Western Sydney U) Alena Soboleva and Paul Nesbit, (Macquarie U), “Coercive citation: understanding the problem and working toward a solution.” Academy of Management Perspectives 2023, 37 (3) 205-219
