Accommodating coercion: Authors, editors, and citations

Eric A. Fong, Ravi Patnayakuni and Allen W. Wilhite

Research Policy, 2023, vol. 52, issue 5

Abstract: Some editors try to artificially inflate their journals' citation count by coercing authors, telling them to add citations referencing their journal even though the review process did not identify any bibliographical shortcomings. However, coercing authors for citations does not, by itself, inflate a journal's citation count; for coercion to be effective, authors must comply with the editor's demands and add those superfluous citations. In this study, we suggest that editors might use their publication authority to sort by or motivate compliance by accepting manuscripts of authors who acquiesce and rejecting studies by those who do not. Data was collected by conducting a survey of academics and includes responses of over 1000 scholars who have been coerced, our results suggest that acquiescence is positively associated with the publication decision, authors who added the coerced citations report significantly greater publication success than those who resist. In addition, we find that authors who acquiesce to coercion also report being more likely to submit to coercive journals in the future and to add superfluous, journal-specific citations before submitting manuscripts. We close with a brief discussion about the ethics of coercion and policy changes that can help reduce these abuses.

Keywords: Coercive citation; Academic misconduct; JIF manipulation; Peer review; Publication ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323000380
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:52:y:2023:i:5:s0048733323000380

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2023.104754

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().