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Researchers Feel Pressure To Cite Superfluous Papers
ananyo writes "One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published in the journal Science (abstract), also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce. The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation,' and shows that this is 'uncomfortably common.' Perhaps the most striking finding of the survey was that although 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. However, figures from Thomson Reuters suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals."
Yeah, but if you go down that path, you wind up with mathematics being nothing but a tool, more a part of the process of science than science itself. Mathematics alone tells us nothing about the universe, other than that mathematics can be derived in it (and then you get back to whether or not you've really derived anything since the foundation is ultimately belief).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Including copious references is not only a way to "pay homage to existing academics". It makes sure that you went through the literature to see if your contribution is really a novelty, and forces you to compare your work against others', which is great both for the expert in the field to better understand your contribution, and for the non-expert, who gets pointers to better grasp some parts or to navigate towards the important papers of a field of research. These are still very important, even if you think your work is technically sound.
I'm talking out of my ass now, and it depends on the research area and the paper, but "It needs more references if you want to get published" might be a polite way for your acquaintances to say, have you provided sufficient motivation for the problem you are solving, thoroughly explored the literature for related proposals, you should compare your ideas against other papers', etc.
In my (former researcher who left to industry) opinion/experience its not the editors who put the pressure, but the possibility that you ignored a work of somebody who is important enough to referee for Nature or Science. There are some components of these phenomena:
a) Maybe the work really is important, and you did not know it because it's too long ago. There is usually nothing wrong with a referee saying "hey that is similar to what [xyz]" did, even if they are on the list of authors on the reference in question.
b) some referees dont react positively to not getting cited and will shoot down any paper not referring to *their* theory for other reasons (i believe that happened to me once)
c) In the abstract (which is the part really read by the editors before the refereeing process) you compare your paper to the previous publications. Authors are under the impression that comparing your work to previous important papers makes a better impression. How far this is true i cant judge. I found the editor stage *before* the refereeing in Nature and Science the most intransparent thing I have experienced as an author. Unlike the refereeing process there is no way to appeal, there is not information on what the editors disliked so much to refuse directly. (There is the saying that once you had Nature/Science papers it gets more likely to pass this stage, and i have seen at least one example of a paper being passed to Nature which for sure would have been rejected by the editors had it come from a less important group in the field)