A retrospective study investigating requests for self-citation during open peer review in a general medicine journal

Erin Peebles, Marissa Scandlyn and Blair R Hesp

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 8, 1-9

Abstract: Introduction: Peer review is a volunteer process for improving the quality of publications by providing objective feedback to authors, but also presents an opportunity for reviewers to seek personal reward by requesting self-citations. Open peer review may reduce the prevalence of self-citation requests and encourage author rebuttal over accession. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of self-citation requests and their inclusion in manuscripts in a journal with open peer review. Methods: Requests for additional references to be included during peer review for articles published between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018 in BMC Medicine were evaluated. Data extracted included total number of self-citations requested, self-citations that were included in the final published manuscript and manuscripts that included at least one self-citation, and compared with corresponding data on independent citations. Results: In total, 932 peer review reports from 373 manuscripts were analysed. At least one additional citation was requested in 25.9% (n = 241) of reports. Self-citation requests were included in 44.4% of reports requesting additional citations (11.5% of all reports). Requests for self-citation were significantly more likely than independent citations to be incorporated in the published manuscript (65.1% vs 52.1%; chi-square p = 0.003). At the manuscript level, when requested, self-citations were incorporated in 76.6% of manuscripts (n = 72; 19.3% of all manuscripts) compared with 68.5% of manuscripts with independent citation requests (n = 102; 27.3% of manuscripts). A significant interaction was observed between the presence of self-citation requests and the likelihood of any citation request being incorporated (100% incorporation in manuscripts with self-citation requests alone versus 62.7–72.2% with any independent citation request; Fisher’s exact test p

Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237804 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 37804&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0237804

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237804

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().