So, am I reading this correctly?
Researchers try to get paper published, but publisher asks for paper authors to add citations that weren't used in the research, presumably to increase citations of certain 'blessed' papers.
Authors add the citations, but also a note that the citations were not used and were asked for by the publisher.
If this is all correct, I'm curious what the publisher's relationship is to those cited papers. Were the citations paid for? Something else?
The usual points
- Elsevier is bad
- Reviewers are not paid 99% of a time
- Editors choose reviewers
- Editors should be managing conflict and avoid that
- Editors in chief is probably the only paid position in peer review process
- Academic publishing industry have higher margin than Tech industry
- Publishers don't have enough incentives to minimize number of publications for quality.
- Again, Elsevier is evil
Personally I dislike links that force me to do a bunch of work to figure out the gist of the post. In this case, it seems like a link to a link to a comment on an academic paper in which the author is frustrated about irrelevant citation requests? Maybe I misunderstood? I would love for submissions like this to include an explanatory snippet to provide context.
Goodhart's law on citation count... Too easy to game. It seems many people do this, and it works for them, because even if their peers just know who is doing it, they're still making bank, see Didier Raoult's paper mill.
See also: The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. Who has the most retractions?
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...
Relevant context[1] of the underlying meta.
[1] https://technicaeditorial.com/cash-for-citations-the-newest-...
This example is one of the entries into the rabbit hole called "science".
> Clear beneficiary is Alex V. Trukhanov, publishing around 50 papers per year since 2018. Notice in particular how he has 17,528 citations in only 5,601 citing papers: more than 3 citations to him in each citing paper, on average. This is a clear indication of either a giant and seminal figure in their field, or citation manipulation.
https://x.com/Dr_5GH/status/1855306578293068005
https://pubpeer.com/publications/1924F147DE045B97261004EB238...
Also note there's a Sergei V Trukhanov on most artificially cited papers, too.