Open-Access Publishers Feeling the Heat: Are They Playing the Citation Game?
Hold onto your lab coats, folks, because the scholarly publishing world just got rocked (again!). A spicy new study, currently chillin’ on the SocArXiv preprint server, has accused two big-shot open-access publishers, MDPI and Frontiers, of engaging in some seriously shady citation shenanigans to pump up their journal impact factors (JIFs). You know, like that friend who only posts selfies with a filter? Yeah, kinda like that.
The study, which is still waiting for the official peer-review stamp of approval, took a deep dive into the citation habits of journals from twenty major for-profit publishers. They crunched data from way back in nineteen ninety-seven all the way to twenty twenty-one, analyzing a whopping eight thousand, three hundred and sixty journals. Talk about a serious data binge!
Self-Citation Overload: When More Isn’t Always Merrier
What did the researchers uncover? Well, it seems like journals published by MDPI and Frontiers might be a little too fond of looking in the mirror, academically speaking. The study found that these journals had a way higher rate of self-citation compared to the journals from other publishers.
But wait, there’s more! The study specifically called out the suspiciously high number of self-citations pointing to articles published within the past five years. Now, if you’re hip to the world of journal metrics, you know that this five-year window is super important because it’s the magic timeframe used to calculate those coveted JIFs. Coincidence? I think not!
This pattern has got a lot of people whispering because it seems less about genuine academic relevance and more about playing a strategic game to inflate those all-important citation numbers.
Experts Cry Foul: Is This Legit Science or Just Citation Manipulation?
Marco Seeber, a professor at the University of Agder and one of the masterminds behind this eyebrow-raising study, didn’t mince words when he talked about the findings. He stressed the “stark difference” in self-citation practices between MDPI and Frontiers compared to other publishers.
Matt Hodgkinson, a research integrity guru and a member of the super serious-sounding Committee on Publication Ethics, chimed in too. He called the concentration of self-citations within that crucial JIF calculation window “highly suspicious.” Basically, it’s like finding a stack of self-addressed love letters—a little too on the nose, don’t you think?
Hodgkinson argues that this type of large-scale self-citation is a symptom of a much bigger problem in academia, driven by a culture that values metrics over actual research impact. He’s calling for publishers to step up their game and actively monitor for citation manipulation, cracking down on both sneaky authors and editors who encourage this kind of behavior.
