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Signs of ‘citation hacking’ flagged in scientific papers
- not2b 6y agoI am no longer in a research role, so I do a lot less publication and reviews than I used to. But in many cases it is perfectly legitimate for a reviewer to ask that citations to that reviewer's work be added, because the editor has chosen that reviewer because they are a leading expert in the field. If it's a narrow specialty, it's quite likely that the expert has already published relevant material that the paper submitter missed. The key is whether the added citation is relevant or not, and that's hard to judge based on statistics. A more common issue I've seen is that there are cliques of academics who've staked out some corner of a field and cite each others' work a lot, even though it isn't that interesting. This doesn't have much to do with the review process.