Issue #102
by Michael Seadle (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
In February 2025, Stuart Macdonald wrote a blog post called “Does Authorship Mean Anything When Academic Papers Are Simply Citable Tokens?”¹ in the LSE [London School of Economics] blog on the “Impact of Social Sciences”. He writes that “... papers are less valued for their content than for providing measures of academic performance.”¹ There are plenty of examples of abuses. Macdonald claims that “When Elsevier provided its authors with an example of good citation style, over 500 cited the completely fictional example.”¹
One of his biggest concerns is about manipulating metrics. “For instance, coercive citation (editors making citation of their own journals a condition of publication) is particularly prevalent in top journals. Over 90% of their authors comply.”¹ ² Accommodating this kind of coercion is widespread.³ COPE’s guidelines have also addressed this problem directly, which suggests how common the problem is.⁴
The number of simple manipulations can be effective: “A tweak or two can make a huge difference to fortunes: re-classification of ‘meeting abstracts’ to ‘academic papers’ resulted in one Biology journal increasing its JIF from 0.24 to 18.3 in a year.”¹ This is not a matter of simple exceptions to normal practices. Another form of manipulation is to add co-authors: “The number of authors per paper has grown rapidly; co-authors will each self-cite and hugely increase paper citation, JIF and all that hangs from these. … Papers in Physics journals can have hundreds of authors…”¹
Macdonald writes that: “The role of academic publishing was once to distribute knowledge from research to the public at large. Now the customer is the academic, paying the publisher direct for required performance measures. … ‘Scholars’, then, pay to be published and look to papers that can be cited almost anywhere in support of almost anything for the greatest return.”¹
It is easy to blame publishers for being greedy, but the issue represents a broader problem in an environment where citation quantity has become the measure of quality. The academic leadership of universities are equally to blame for fostering an environment where positions, promotions, and pay depend directly on citation success. No individual can change this. It will take a community effort to restore the primacy of content as the goal of writing academic papers.
1: Macdonald, Stuart. 2025. “Does Authorship Mean Anything When Academic Papers Are Simply Citable Tokens?” Impact of Social Sciences (blog). February 17, 2025. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/02/17/does-authorship-mean-anything-when-academic-papers-are-simply-citable-tokens/.
2: This happens also in the LIS field. I can share a recent example privately.
3: Fong, Eric A., Ravi Patnayakuni, and Allen W. Wilhite. 2023. “Accommodating Coercion: Authors, Editors, and Citations.” Research Policy 52 (5): 104754. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104754.4: “Editor and Reviewers Requiring Authors to Cite Their Own Work.” n.d. COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics. Accessed February 23, 2025. https://publicationethics.org/guidance/case/editor-and-reviewers-requiring-authors-cite-their-own-work.
Feature Stories solely reflect the opinion of the author.
Comments