Accommodating coercion: Authors, editors, and citations

Some editors try to artificially inflate their journals' citation count by coercing authors, telling them to add citations referencing their journal even though the review process did not identify any bibliographical shortcomings. However, coercing authors for citations does not, by itself, inflate a journal's citation count; for coercion to be effective, authors must comply with the editor's demands and add those superfluous citations. In this study, we suggest that editors might use their publication authority to sort by or motivate compliance by accepting manuscripts of authors who acquiesce and rejecting studies by those who do not. Data was collected by conducting a survey of academics and includes responses of over 1000 scholars who have been coerced, our results suggest that acquiescence is positively associated with the publication decision, authors who added the coerced citations report significantly greater publication success than those who resist. In addition, we find that authors who acquiesce to coercion also report being more likely to submit to coercive journals in the future and to add superfluous, journal-specific citations before submitting manuscripts. We close with a brief discussion about the ethics of coercion and policy changes that can help reduce these abuses. •The vast majority of coerced authors accommodate editorial coercive requests.•Accommodating editor coercion is associated with a higher chance of publication.•After being coerced, authors may be more open to future citation manipulation.•Removing self-citations from JIF calculations eliminates the incentive to coerce.