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Findings: Two-thirds of researchers claim pressure to cite superfluous work

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It was an online poll which drew in 4300 Nature readers, and the proportion claiming such influence was higher than in previous surveys.

The difference could be down to the Nature poll’s limitations: respondents were self-selecting and people who have been affected or are interested in coercive citation may be more likely to respond. Whether citations are ‘superfluous’ is likely to be subjective in some cases, and respondents were not asked whether reviewers were asking for their own studies to be cited.

Dalmeet Singh Chawla, “Two-thirds of researchers report ‘pressure to cite’ in Nature poll” at Nature

That said, as time goes on, the gravy train gets longer and longer. Lots of rackets collapse when there are just too many users to pay off.

See also: Peer review and citation ring busted

Comments
Although difficult to prove, I suspect that reviewers recommending the referencing of their own papers is a fairly common practice. Reviewers are typically anonymous but I have had a few recommend the inclusion of references that were clearly of little relevance to the submitted paper. I suspect that they were the authors of the paper, but I can’t prove it. On the positive side, my refusal to these references has never resulted in my submission being rejected.Ed George
October 2, 2019
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