Brazilian Journals' Self-Citation Cartel Smashed

ananyo writes "Thomson Reuters has uncovered a Brazilian self-citation cartel in which editors of journals cited each other to boost their impact factors. The cartel grew out of frustration with the system for evaluating graduate programs, which places too much emphasis on publishing in 'top tier' journals, one of the editors claims. As emerging Brazilian journals are in the lowest ranks, few graduates want to publish in them. This vicious cycle, in his view, prevents local journals improving. Both the Brazilian education ministry and Thomson Reuters have censured the journals. The ministry says articles from the journals published in 2012-12 will not count in any future assessment, and Thomson Reuters has suspended their impact factors."

Re:Here's the problem

[slartibartfastatp]

When you read TFA, you might notice that 14 journals were suspendend - four of them are from Brasil. So keep your crap to yourself.

Statistics and editorializing

[OzPeter]

Please read TFA. TFS makes it look like a problem in Brazil when in fact it is a lot wider than that. From TFA

Four Brazilian journals were among 14 to have their impact factors suspended for a year for such stacking

Each year, Thomson Reuters detects and cracks down on excessive self-citation. This year alone, it red-flagged 23 more journals for the wearily familiar practice

The journals flagged by the new algorithm extend beyond Brazil — but only in that case has an explanation for the results emerged.

What happened in the cases of the other ten journals censured for citation stacking is unclear. One involves a close pattern of citations between three Italian journals (International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology, Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents and European Journal of Inflammation) all with the same editor-in-chief, Pio Conti, an immunologist at the University of Chieti-Pescara.

In another case, review articles with hundreds of references to Science China Life Sciences were meant not to lift its impact factor, but to clarify confusions after a rebranding and to “promote the newly reformed journal to potential new readers”

In a further case, the Journal of Instrumentation saw hundreds of cross-citations from papers authored in SPIE Proceedings by Ryszard Romaniuk, an electronic engineer who was part of the collaboration that put together the CMS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

And finally

The journals currently suspended for either self-citation or citation stacking represent only 0.6% of the 10,853 in Thomson Reuters’ respected directory.