Researchers pressured by editors to make superfluous citations

Nature : Twenty percent of academics from a variety of fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published, according to a survey conducted by Eric Fong and Allen Whilhite of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Published in Science , the survey results also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty with requests for extra citations as a condition of publication. It has been known for many years that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost their journals’ impact factor, but the survey’s figures were higher than expected. While 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal’s prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. To compensate for the potential inflationary effect that excessive self-citation can have on a journal’s impact factor, Thomson Reuters started publishing impact factors with and without self-citations in 2009.