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Brazilian Journals' Self-Citation Cartel Smashed
ananyo writes "Thomson Reuters has uncovered a Brazilian self-citation cartel in which editors of journals cited each other to boost their impact factors. The cartel grew out of frustration with the system for evaluating graduate programs, which places too much emphasis on publishing in 'top tier' journals, one of the editors claims. As emerging Brazilian journals are in the lowest ranks, few graduates want to publish in them. This vicious cycle, in his view, prevents local journals improving. Both the Brazilian education ministry and Thomson Reuters have censured the journals. The ministry says articles from the journals published in 2012-12 will not count in any future assessment, and Thomson Reuters has suspended their impact factors."
...and my first thought was: Wow! How many zeros in a brazillion?
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Metrics influence journals more than journals influence metrics.
Tier 1 journals do the same. It is open secret that you are more likely to get published if you heavily citing papers from the journal.
Impact factors, publish or perish, and pay walled articles means that a lot of shoddy "science" is going on out of public's eye. In a small field you are not going to rock the boat when your college is pushing out questionable papers. Sure, if you get selected to review the paper you can push back, but then you get to known by editors as "difficult one" and excluded in the future. Back when I worked in science more than half papers were unreproducible, meaning they collected data until significance then wrote paper around it.
More = Better mentality has to go. We do not push boundary of our knowledge by verbiage and fishing expeditions.
Science publishing is totally broken. Brazilians were just emulating the behavior of western Europe, China, and North America. The only difference is that we have practised this stupid game for much longer and we are better at not getting caught.
When you read TFA, you might notice that 14 journals were suspendend - four of them are from Brasil. So keep your crap to yourself.
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Well, it takes much more work, but would have worked a lot better if editors focused on paper quality instead. Doing a good review (a review which really helps the authors to improve the quality of their research) is a lot of hard work. I still don't understand why mostly it's unpaid. They could go as far as paying the reviewers proportionally to the number of (real) citations, obtained by the reviewed paper, in two years after the publication. That would really encourage doing good reviews, and helping the authors.
The system is broken, but few people outside university realize how badly it is broken. I did some reviews, but I prefer to not, because there is no reward, and my time is better spent on actual research. Also it happened to me once, that I recommended rejecting a paper and I worked hard to write a good review, and the paper was published nevertheless with only few things corrected. How that journal expects to have a high citation rate is beyond me. Yes I understand that the reviewers work is for free and for the sake of humanity, but the level to which it is exploited by journals is just outrageous. I feel much better developing open source software, which is also done for free and for the sake of humanity, becuase nobody exploits me doing this.
This cartel is not the only one. And more of this will happen in near future until some kind of revolution will take place. Moving toward open access is a good direction and I hope that it will take part in revolutionizing the pulication mechanisms.
Oh well, I hope that more scandalous things like this one will resurface, which will tell people that a reform is needed. And maybe something that encourages quality and not cheating will be discovered....
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Back when I worked in science in my field it took about 2mil to conduct a study, with another 10 mil in infrastructure costs. I am sure it costs even more now. This is very much outside third-world budget range. Does all this tech gadgetry help design better studies? Absolutely, but you don't have to have latest and greatest to do interesting work. Unfortunately Tier 1 journals don't see it this way, if you don't have X $toy$ in your lab, you might as well not submit manuscripts. Also if you are the first to get new expensive tech you can publish low hanging fruit (validation plus comparison to old tech) and all but guarantee no-effort papers. So arm race to spend on new gadgetry is always there.
Please read TFA. TFS makes it look like a problem in Brazil when in fact it is a lot wider than that. From TFA
Four Brazilian journals were among 14 to have their impact factors suspended for a year for such stacking
Each year, Thomson Reuters detects and cracks down on excessive self-citation. This year alone, it red-flagged 23 more journals for the wearily familiar practice
The journals flagged by the new algorithm extend beyond Brazil — but only in that case has an explanation for the results emerged.
What happened in the cases of the other ten journals censured for citation stacking is unclear. One involves a close pattern of citations between three Italian journals (International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents and European Journal of Inflammation) all with the same editor-in-chief, Pio Conti, an immunologist at the University of Chieti-Pescara.
In another case, review articles with hundreds of references to Science China Life Sciences were meant not to lift its impact factor, but to clarify confusions after a rebranding and to “promote the newly reformed journal to potential new readers”
In a further case, the Journal of Instrumentation saw hundreds of cross-citations from papers authored in SPIE Proceedings by Ryszard Romaniuk, an electronic engineer who was part of the collaboration that put together the CMS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
And finally
The journals currently suspended for either self-citation or citation stacking represent only 0.6% of the 10,853 in Thomson Reuters’ respected directory.
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