Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here.

Just when serious scholars started to worry about the pandemic of junk citations, others were positively promoting them. The “citation justice” movement I discussed in the last installment is one example. Another, which I will discuss here, is less visible: “citation-doping,” which some scholars and academic journals use to boost their citation counts.

Not all citation-doping is seen by its practitioners as unethical. Often, it is unintentional; other times, it is thought to be fair play given the competition for citations. At my host university in Thailand, large banners are hoisted across campus every year to congratulate faculty and graduate students whose work was highly cited in the previous year. With so much at stake, it’s little wonder that inordinate effort goes into boosting, or “doping,” citation counts by means fair or foul.

Author-level doping begins with the simple act of citing one’s own truly remarkable research with alarming frequency. This leads to some comical outcomes, such as the discovery that the hitherto unknown giant of computer science research, Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan of the privately run Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai, India, was as highly cited in his field as Nobel laureates. A study of super self-citers found, on closer inspection, that 94% of Vaidyanathan’s citations came from himself or his co-authors, compared to a median self-citation rate across all disciplines of about 13%. The study listed no fewer than 100,000 researchers like Vaidyanathan who had gained more than half of their citations from their biggest fan.

Many claim that men self-cite more than women. Thus, female academics raise their fists with the battle cry to “cite only women.” This claim is untrue, though, according to a study of 1.6 million articles published between 2002 and 2005 in the field of biomedicine. The real reason for the disparity is that more productive scholars have more opportunities and greater visibility, both of which allow for relevant self-citations. Women tend to have shorter, more disrupted careers, which lessens both factors. Women otherwise self-cite just as often as men do.

[Related: “How Junk Citations Have Discredited the Academy: Part 3”]

The more nefarious form of author-level doping involves “citation rings,” or “citation cartels.” Here, a group of scholars colludes to cite one another’s work. In 2014, the publisher Sage retracted 60 articles in the Journal of Vibration and Control, alleging that Peter Chen of National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan had forged a network of fraudsters (including the Taiwanese Minister of Education, who resigned over the scandal) that was used to peer-review and then, later, cite the works of the cartel members.

More vigilant editors could catch this. So, a newer practice is to sneak in cartel citations in the production phase when the editors are asleep. In this paper from China, the authors added no fewer than 10 citations in a concluding sentence that was not in the pre-print edition. This, according to the gadfly site PubPeer, is known as a “citation delivery vehicle.”

Sometimes, the journal editors themselves are the dopers. So-called “coercive citations” are the academic equivalent of the casting couch, forcing prospective authors to cite the work of the journal editors in order to be considered for publication. Biophysicist Kuo-Chen Chou of Boston was barred from the editorial board of the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 2020 for his quite untheoretical habit of demanding that authors cite his papers (an astounding average of 31 for each aspiring author). Sometimes, he even forced them to add him as a co-author. Not surprisingly, academics now make a point of citing the editors of the journals they submit to in advance. Nothing like a little flattery to grease the wheels of the scientific endeavor.

It’s a small step from author-level doping to journal-level doping. Although journal impact factors are supposed to exclude citations to a journal from that journal itself, many editors still ask authors to lard some references to past articles. The index Journal Citation Reports suspended 329 journals for excessive self-citations between 2007 and 2017.

[Related: “How Junk Citations Have Discredited the Academy: Part 2”]

To skirt the self-citation exclusions, journals collude with sister publications to force authors to cite articles in each other’s journal. Thomson Reuters suspended the journal Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI) for boosting the citation performance of sister journal Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM). An inquiry discovered that 39% of the 2015 citations to MIM came from ACI. Similarly, three Romanian physics journals doped each other’s citation counts, according to a 2016 article by Petr Heneberg of Charles University in Prague.

Often the journal-level dope is injected during the key years when a journal’s impact factor is being calculated, usually the most recent two to five years. As a result, articles older than this become essentially ignored, worsening the bias toward “the latest” thinking, which is already super-charged by the Internet and social media.

Of course, as with author-level doping, some journal-level doping is unintentional. U.S. law school students who edit law reviews, bless their hearts, seem to think that all important research on American law is published in student-edited law reviews. They thus encourage authors to reference little else. It’s endearing, but wrong, according to an analysis by four Israeli scholars.

Citation justice warriors point to such sociological causes as reasons why they need to form their own rival citation cartels for, say, blacks or homosexuals. Citation justice is, in this respect, simply a citation cartel in the open. Academic citations thus devolve into a sort of eighteenth-century naval battle in which various ships under different flags maneuver to gain the headwind while blasting off cannons of citations to scuttle yonder scoundrels.

In the concluding installment of this series, I will consider some solutions to the flotsam and jetsam of academic credibility caused by junk citations.

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