They’re not the kind of gangs that smuggle drugs and murder people. But people looking closely at the scientific literature have discovered that a small number of scientists are part of a different kind of cartel — ones that band together to reference each other’s work, gaming the citation system to make their studies appear to be more important and worthy of attention.
These so-called citation cartels have been around for decades, as the publishing consultant Phil Davis
has pointed out. Thomson Reuters, which until recently owned the Impact Factor for ranking journals, has even
sanctioned periodicals for evidence of cartel behavior.
Davis, who clearly has an eye for this kind of thing, unearthed a citation cartel a few years back when he came across a 2010 article in Medical Science Monitor with a glaring feature: Of its 490 references, 445 were to articles in an emerging medical journal called Cell Transplantation. Of the rest, 44 were to papers in … Medical Science Monitor. Davis also noticed this: “Three of the four authors of this paper sit on the editorial board of Cell Transplantation. Two are associate editors, one is the founding editor. The fourth is the CEO of a medical communications company.”
