20% of Academics Report Coercive Citation Amidst Calls for Rigorous Journal Standards

A recent social media post by Soumitra Shukla has reignited debate within the scientific community regarding the integrity of academic publishing, criticizing journals for enforcing "citation by diktat" over genuine scholarly rigor. Shukla emphasized that "Quality and relevance of ideas should come first and last---everything else in between is noise," highlighting concerns that citation practices are sometimes driven by factors other than intellectual merit. This sentiment resonates with long-standing issues surrounding coercive citation, where editors or institutions pressure authors to include irrelevant references.

Coercive citation is an unethical practice where journal editors or reviewers demand authors add citations to papers, often from the same journal, as a condition for publication. This manipulation is primarily aimed at artificially inflating a journal's impact factor, a metric widely used to gauge a publication's influence. Unlike legitimate requests to improve an article's scholarly context, coercive demands typically lack specific justification for the missing attribution and exclusively direct authors to cite the editor's own journal.

The prevalence of this issue is significant, with a 2012 survey by Wilhite and Fong revealing that approximately 20% of academics across economics, sociology, psychology, and business disciplines have experienced coercive citation. The study found that 86% of respondents considered the practice unethical, and it was noted that commercial publishers and even some highly-ranked journals were more likely to engage in such tactics. This practice undermines the credibility of research and distorts the true intellectual landscape.

In a recent development, an Iraqi university has reportedly institutionalized "citation by diktat," requiring graduate students to cite articles from its own journals to fulfill graduation requirements. Experts have condemned this as a "deceptive and despicable" practice, warning that it targets vulnerable academic populations and could lead to penalties for the journals involved. Such mandates exemplify the shift from valuing research content to prioritizing metric manipulation.

This ongoing debate underscores a critical challenge in academic publishing: balancing the need for measurable impact with the fundamental pursuit of scientific quality and relevance. The call for rigorous citation standards, free from dictatorial pressures, is a plea for a return to practices that genuinely advance knowledge rather than merely boosting statistical indicators. The scientific community continues to grapple with how to ensure that the integrity of research remains paramount.