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; 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. Individual cases have also been reported in other disciplines.

The impact factor (IF) of a journal is a measure of how often, on average, papers published in the journal are cited in other academic publications. The IF was devised in the 1950s as a simple way to rank scientific journals. Today, in some disciplines, the prestige of a publication is determined largely by its impact factor.

Use of the impact factor is not necessarily undesirable as it can reasonably incentivise editors to improve their journal through the publication of good science. Two well-known academic journals, Nature and Science, had impact factors of 36 and 31 respectively. A respected journal in a sub-field, such as cognitive science, might have an impact factor of around 3.

However, impact factors have also become a source of increasing controversy. As early as 1999, in a landmark essay Scientific Communication — A Vanity Fair?, Georg Franck criticized citation counts as creating a marketplace where "success in science is rewarded with attention". In particular, he warned of a future "shadow market" where journal editors might inflate citation counts by requiring spurious references. In 2005, an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called it "the number that's devouring science".

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. Specifically, the term refers to requests which:

...
Wikipedia