Academic Publishing Clubs, Cartels, Professional Networks, and Coercive Citations

Now here is where the words ‘big’, ‘top’, and ‘major’ get very confusing. Our assessment of the process is there are publishers in ‘The Club’, and there are the publishers not in ‘The Club’. As an Inderscience editor very clearly told a packed room of doctoral students, “journal publishing consists of a mafia”. Maybe a little strong for most, so we prefer to refer to his idea of professional networks as ‘clubs’ or maybe even, ‘cartels’ [146]. Our experience has also convinced us that yes indeed; some journals, their editors, their authors, and even their reviewers are in a ‘club’, which can precipitate an easier and quicker manuscript review. Being a member might also negate the journal’s required Turnitin report on your paper if you attended the editor’s conference.

We might also add here that although research is very limited concerning the peer review process, tantalizing insights can be found from a study from sociologist Misha Teplitskiy at the University of Michigan and his colleagues. The researchers were confidentially supplied with reviewers’ identities for 7,982 neuroscience manuscripts submitted to PLoS ONE, and discovered that reviewers tended to favor authors connected to them through co-authorship and professional networks. This is frowned-on practice broadly termed coercive citation [48, 145-148], which we have found to be quite common, especially with European based journals, their editors and the journal editor’s reviewers. We would also like to add from our personal experiences that the ‘coercive citation’ process is rampant, with our observations indicating that the process takes place more frequently as the quartile and ‘respectability’ of the journal increases. Elsevier’s own internal investigations told Nature that they “discovered clear evidence of peer-review manipulation” [48]. Please be clear that being asked to cite a paper by the journal from the same journal or another from their sister publications, in our opinion, is OK.

Where we, and many others have problems, is when a reviewer ‘suggests’ the inclusion of multiple papers which they authored into your paper, which often times has nothing to do with your topic. Of course, since the review is ‘blind’, you can never know if what you suspect as unethical is true, as unfortunately, only the editor knows the name of the reviewer. Where the problem becomes even shadier is when top tier OA journals use ‘guest editors,’ which they have randomly selected to be the guest editor for your paper, additionally asking these temporary/guest editors to personally select the reviewers for your manuscript.

As a real-world example of this practice, most recently, a Quartile 1 journal editor sent the authors the reviewer comments for a paper. In the comments, the reviewer asked the authors to review (and cite) three papers, all of which had the same two authors. Additionally, even though the article was being sent to an OA Elsevier journal, the three papers were all published in non-OA Elsevier journals which could only be accessed by having an account or paying for the downloads. Furthermore, after paying for the papers, it was obvious that two of the paper’s topics were of very limited use to the paper’s research, while the third paper was totally useless. And to add a cherry to top of this cake, the guest editor, although employed in a UK university (after a bit of research as coercive citation practices was suspected), it was discovered [insert gender] had done [insert gender] academic education in [insert EU country]. Try guessing where the suggested papers and authors were from…..yup….you guessed it….[insert same EU country]. Coincidence?

We will also note that other research backs us up in these observations, with this article referring to coercive citation as “uncomfortably common” [144], while this article from Science suggests that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce [145]. Finally, in this conclusion from the authors Wren et al. (2019), they state that “This phenomenon of reviewer-coerced citations is not new (Huggett, 2013; Loannidis, 2015; Resnik et al., 2008; Thombs & Razykov, 2012; Thombs et al., 2015; Wilhite & Fong, 2012), but also not very well explored in terms of how extensive it may be or how it should be dealt with.” In all the cases we have first-hand knowledge of; the first author was a doctoral student, which fits the pattern of all the previous studies and internal reports. 

QUOTE:  C. B. Jones - “Academic publishing is a cartel, organized into clubs, which is run like a mafia” [193].

QUOTE: Daniel Akst - In an article, “Misconduct, Not Errors, Cause Most Retractions”, “misconduct was most prevalent in the most prestigious journals. The researchers point to intense pressure for scientists to publish; institutions and science funders rely heavily on published articles in making a decision about who to give a job or grant” [194]

QUOTE: Tim Gowers - “Returning to the subject of morality, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse Elsevier of immoral behaviour: they are a big business and they want to maximize their profits, as businesses do” [197].

QUOTE: Elaine Westbrooks, university librarian at UNC Chapel Hill, “I tried to work with Elsevier but we had no choice but to break our big deal” [137]