Science Magazine: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing
Posted: February 23rd, 2012 | Author: Sven | Filed under: fraud, journals | Tags: academic publishing, Citation, impact factor, ranking | Comments Off on Science Magazine: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing
As many of you know, the impact factor is a major vehicle for measuring the quality of a scholarly journal. Despite there is a lot of criticism on impact factors, for researchers as well as for journals a high impact factor is as attractive as honey is for the bears.
One side effect of impact factors is that they’re creating incentives for editors to coerce authors to add citations to their journal – indicating that more citations are inflating the journal’s impact factor.
At the beginning of February, the science magazine published a remarkable article that deals with forced citations in scholarly journals.
