Publicado en The Chronicle of Higher Education
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dark-world-of-citation-cartels
El oscuro mundo de los "cárteles de citas".
Las revistas depredadoras y los académicos de mala fe juegan con el sistema a gran escala.
Por Domingo Docampo
6 DE MARZO DE 2024
En el complejo panorama del mundo académico moderno, la máxima "publicar o perecer" ha ido evolucionando gradualmente hacia un mantra diferente: "Consigue que te citen o tu carrera se verá arruinada". Las citas son la nueva moneda de cambio académica, y las carreras dependen ahora firmemente de esta forma de reconocimiento académico. De hecho, las citas se han vuelto tan importantes que han impulsado una nueva forma de engaño: las redes subrepticias diseñadas para manipular las citas. Los investigadores, movidos por el imperativo de asegurar el impacto académico, recurren a la formación de anillos de citas: círculos de colaboración diseñados para aumentar artificialmente la visibilidad de su trabajo. Al hacerlo, comprometen la integridad del discurso académico y socavan los cimientos de la actividad académica. La historia del moderno "cártel de citas" (citation cartel) no es sólo el resultado de la presión editorial. El auge de las mega-revistas también desempeña un papel, al igual que las revistas depredadoras y los esfuerzos institucionales por prosperar en las clasificaciones académicas mundiales.
En la última década, el panorama de la investigación académica se ha visto considerablemente alterado por el gran número de académicos que se dedican a tareas científicas. Por ejemplo, se ha duplicado el número de académicos que contribuyen a publicaciones indexadas en matemáticas. En respuesta a la creciente demanda de espacio en las publicaciones científicas, un nuevo tipo de empresario editorial ha aprovechado la oportunidad, y el resultado es el auge de las megarevistas que publican miles de artículos al año. Mathematics, una revista de acceso abierto producida por el Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, publicó más de 4.763 artículos en 2023, lo que representa el 9,3% de todas las publicaciones en este campo, según la Web of Science. Tiene un factor de impacto de 2,4 y una medida de la influencia de los artículos de sólo 0,37, pero, sobre todo, está indexada en Web of Science de Clarivate, Scopus de Elsevier y otros indexadores, lo que significa que sus citas cuentan para una serie de métricas profesionales. (En cambio, los Annals of Mathematics, publicados por la Universidad de Princeton, contenían 22 artículos el año pasado, y tienen un factor de impacto de 4,9 y una medida de la influencia de los artículos de 8,3).
In the complex landscape of modern academe, the maxim “publish or perish” has been gradually evolving into a different mantra: “Get cited or your career gets blighted.” Citations are the new academic currency, and careers now firmly depend on this form of scholarly recognition. In fact, citation has become so important that it has driven a novel form of trickery: stealth networks designed to manipulate citations. Researchers, driven by the imperative to secure academic impact, resort to forming citation rings: collaborative circles engineered to artificially boost the visibility of their work. In doing so, they compromise the integrity of academic discourse and undermine the foundation of scholarly pursuit. The story of the modern “citation cartel” is not just a result of publication pressure. The rise of the mega-journal also plays a role, as do predatory journals and institutional efforts to thrive in global academic rankings.
Over the past decade, the landscape of academic research has been significantly altered by the sheer number of scholars engaging in scientific endeavors. The number of scholars contributing to indexed publications in mathematics has doubled, for instance. In response to the heightened demand for space in scientific publications, a new breed of publishing entrepreneur has seized the opportunity, and the result is the rise of mega-journals that publish thousands of articles annually. Mathematics, an open-access journal produced by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, published more than 4,763 articles in 2023, making up 9.3 percent of all publications in the field, according to the Web of Science. It has an impact factor of 2.4 and an article-influence measure of just 0.37, but, crucially, it is indexed with Clarivate’s Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and other indexers, which means its citations count toward a variety of professional metrics. (By contrast, the Annals of Mathematics, published by Princeton University, contained 22 articles last year, and has an impact factor of 4.9 and an article-influence measure of 8.3.)
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The Dark World of “Citation Cartels”. Predatory journals and bad-faith scholars are gaming the system - at scale
MARCH 6, 2024
In the complex landscape of modern academe, the maxim “publish or perish” has been gradually evolving into a different mantra: “Get cited or your career gets blighted.” Citations are the new academic currency, and careers now firmly depend on this form of scholarly recognition. In fact, citation has become so important that it has driven a novel form of trickery: stealth networks designed to manipulate citations. Researchers, driven by the imperative to secure academic impact, resort to forming citation rings: collaborative circles engineered to artificially boost the visibility of their work. In doing so, they compromise the integrity of academic discourse and undermine the foundation of scholarly pursuit. The story of the modern “citation cartel” is not just a result of publication pressure. The rise of the mega-journal also plays a role, as do predatory journals and institutional efforts to thrive in global academic rankings.
Over the past decade, the landscape of academic research has been significantly altered by the sheer number of scholars engaging in scientific endeavors. The number of scholars contributing to indexed publications in mathematics has doubled, for instance. In response to the heightened demand for space in scientific publications, a new breed of publishing entrepreneur has seized the opportunity, and the result is the rise of mega-journals that publish thousands of articles annually. Mathematics, an open-access journal produced by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, published more than 4,763 articles in 2023, making up 9.3 percent of all publications in the field, according to the Web of Science. It has an impact factor of 2.4 and an article-influence measure of just 0.37, but, crucially, it is indexed with Clarivate’s Web of Science, Elsevier’s Scopus, and other indexers, which means its citations count toward a variety of professional metrics. (By contrast, the Annals of Mathematics, published by Princeton University, contained 22 articles last year, and has an impact factor of 4.9 and an article-influence measure of 8.3.)
Mega-journals thrive in the open-access era, providing a convenient platform for researchers eager to see their work published and widely read. Without paywalls, articles in those journals can be shared (and cited) seamlessly. The journal earns “article-processing charges” paid by an article’s authors or their institutions, with fees typically running in the low four figures in U.S. dollars per article. Citation rings, which have existed for decades, now exploit the mega-journals’ quick and easy peer-review processes to funnel thousands of references to their collaborators. The result is a distortion of scholarly-citation indexes and impact-factor scores that allow mediocre scholarship to appear to be much more influential than it is — for the right price for the journal, of course.
One important citation metric targeted for citational gamesmanship is Clarivate’s prestigious “Highly Cited Researchers” list. “Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers™ are 1 in 1,000,” Clarivate explains. Inclusion on the list occurs first via citation activity: “Each researcher selected has authored multiple Highly Cited Papers™ which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s).” That list is then “refined using qualitative analysis and expert judgment.” By and large, Clarivate’s label of Highly Cited Researcher is recognized by the research community as a marker of influence.
The Highly Cited Researchers list also feeds into one indicator in the Shanghai Ranking, an academic ranking of world universities. In a bid for international visibility, institutions are not always averse to their faculty members’ finding shortcuts to academic recognition, even those that involve dubious citation practices. The lure of climbing the international-ranking tables is powerful. That symbiotic relationship between citation rings, mega-journals, and global rankings underscores the urgency of uncovering citation malpractice.
The proliferation of predatory journals further exacerbates the problem. The academic librarian Jeffrey Beall raised the alarm about such publishers in Nature in 2012, detailing the “unethical quagmire” in which copyright manipulation, surprise invoicing, unsound methodologies, altered photos, and even plagiarism occurred. “Beall’s List,” which operated until Beall shut it down, in 2017, alerted scholars to potentially predatory publishers, often with innocuous names. Despite attempts to raise scholarly awareness about those issues, and despite Clarivate’s many efforts to detect anomalous citation patterns, predatory journals have continued to erode the prestige of the Highly Cited Researchers list. That trend poses a severe threat to the credibility of academic achievement.
To better understand the nature of the issue, let us focus on a particular citation ring. An analysis I am conducting with two French colleagues shows how concerted citation tactics can produce a staggering number of highly cited papers in mathematics in a very short period. In 2023 a network of around 100 researchers managed to co-author 17 papers — and get those papers cited 396 times from 2023 to early 2024. That is a remarkable citation rate. All 17 papers are on Clarivate’s “Highly Cited Papers” list for mathematics in 2023.
An intriguing pattern emerges when examining the articles that reference those 17 papers: The total number of citing articles is 84, 75 of which are either self-citations or co-author citations. That tight collaboration suggests a closely knit network of authors with potential biases in the citation patterns, casting doubt on the actual influence of the scholarship. Moreover, the average number of references to the 17 Highly Cited Papers is close to five, with several articles garnering more than five citations. Typical individual mathematicians would have received just one scholarly reference to their 2023 publications from other work in the field.
Let us focus on one of the citing articles, to see the peculiar way some targeted references appear:
For future research directions, we hope to do some related work on singularity theory and symmetry (see [13–20]).
References 13 to 20 are papers with the same first author and an editor of an open-access journal where four of the 17 highly cited papers published by the network in 2023 appeared, along with 21 of the network’s 75 citing articles.
In another of those 75 citing articles, we find 10 self-citations within the network — nine of the references (Nos. 15 to 23) again to papers from within the network with the same first author. Those nine are lumped as follows in the text, right after an appropriate reference (No. 14):
… studied the timelike circular surfaces in Minkowski 3-space from the viewpoint of singularity theory. They presented singularities and symmetry properties of timelike circular surfaces in Minkowski 3-space [14]. Moreover, some of the latest connected studies about symmetry and singularity can be seen in [15–23].
That way of artificially acknowledging someone else’s work is not the result of the well-known Matthew effect, the “enhancement of the position of already eminent scientists who are given disproportionate credit in cases of collaboration.” Instead, it results from a concerted group effort to elevate one scholar at the top of its pyramid. The network we uncovered has produced 75 inconspicuous papers, primarily published in mega-journals, within a short time frame. The journals do not command the same level of attention and scrutiny as established venues, and so there is generally little recognition of the network’s research. But that lack of scrutiny serves the citation ring’s interests — less-scrupulous citation standards allow it to cite and thus elevate work published in the same types of journals.
Ultimately, our analysis points to a well-organized network leveraging collaboration and citations to elevate scores of recent articles to the top 1 percent most cited. Several undesirable outcomes follow. Deserving scholars are cheated out of having their influence recognized. The apparent influence of mediocre scholarship may mislead graduate students. And the lack of reliability of citation metrics will have an adverse impact on the discipline as a whole.
What can we do to combat such scholarly shortcuts? We must foster a culture prioritizing research quality and integrity, and we must unravel the web of citation rings. Academic and research institutions must encourage and reward rigorous, groundbreaking research through adequate hiring, promotion, and salary raises.
Publishers must be fully accountable as well. Mega-journals must work to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record. They can safeguard their credibility by developing strategies that detect and prevent the manipulation of citations. Editors who abide by rigorous standards know that maintaining the quality of peer review is challenging, given that good reviewers are usually good researchers with scarce spare time. Discussion of that issue should involve introducing appropriate incentives for reviewers and further extending the use of more innovative reviewing processes, for instance reviews published side by side with articles or post-publication reviews in which scientists can comment on the work.
The challenge of citation malpractice is not confined to a specific research subject or region. Its ramifications extend far beyond the immediate concerns of established scholars, casting a looming shadow over the future of young researchers. As the pressure to gather citations intensifies, aspiring academics may find themselves at a crossroads where the temptation to take shortcuts becomes particularly acute. Young researchers, who should concentrate on exploring the frontiers of knowledge, risk compromising their intellectual integrity and may find themselves trapped in a web of dishonest practices with no clear path back to ethical behavior.
As things stand today, good researchers who choose to stay on the right track may face difficulties in career progression and funding opportunities. They may be gradually pushed toward roles with lower research intensity and lose their chance to make significant contributions to their field. That scenario would lead to a system failure with disastrous consequences.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Domingo Docampo is a professor of statistical signal processing at the University of Vigo, in Spain.
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