Coercive citation

Coercive citation occurs when an editor or reviewer conditions a favourable decision on the author adding citations that serve the editor’s or reviewer’s own interest — most often self-citations to their own work or to the journal’s back catalogue — without a substantive scientific rationale. Wilhite and Fong’s 2012 study in Science documented the practice’s prevalence in business and economics journals via an author survey, finding a meaningful share of respondents had received a citation request they judged unjustified by the manuscript’s content.

The defining feature is coercion, not the citation request itself: reviewers routinely and legitimately suggest specific citations, including their own work, where it fills a genuine gap. COPE’s guidance on citation manipulation distinguishes a request that comes with a stated scientific rationale and leaves the final decision to the author from one issued as a condition of acceptance with no rationale given. A request becomes coercive when refusing it risks the manuscript’s outcome, which is why the practice is grouped with other abuses of a reviewer’s or editor’s structural power over an author who cannot decline without cost.

Coercive citation inflates the journal’s impact factor and the individual reviewer’s or editor’s own citation count and h-index, and because both metrics feed into institutional evaluation, funding, and promotion decisions elsewhere in the system, the distortion compounds well beyond the single manuscript. Publishers have responded with several structural defences: blinding reviewers to the journal’s self-citation rate at the point of review, monitoring citation patterns by editorial-board member, requiring editors to justify unusually high self-citation requests, and, at some journals, capping the acceptable share of a paper’s references drawn from the reviewing journal itself.

Coercive citation is distinct from citation stacking or citation cartels, in which groups of editors or authors coordinate reciprocal citation across journals without any single coercive request being issued to an individual author — both inflate the same metrics, and both sit within COPE’s citation-manipulation guidance, but the mechanism differs: one is a power play against a single author, the other a coordinated arrangement among peers. An author who believes they have received a coercive citation request has recourse to the journal’s editor-in-chief, the publisher’s ethics office, and, if the journal is a COPE member, to COPE itself.