
The Journal That Couldn’t Stop Citing Itself - benbreen
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Journal-That-Couldn-t/233313
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kazinator
So what?

The journal isn't citing itself _per se_ , but the works of authors that it
published. The editor making the citations isn't citing his or her own
personal prior work.

If the citations are useful and relevant, that's fair game. The journal has
published a lot of papers, and the editorial references those papers.

It was probably convenient for the editor, owing to the familiarity with the
published content of their own journal.

(If some of the references were _circular_ , that would be comically
noteworthy.)

Presumably the point here is that the editor doesn't care about researching
papers which do not appear in their journal. That's could be a justifiable, if
arrogant, point of view. ("Anything _potentially_ worthy of publishing in this
field arrives on the doorstep of our journal, and anything _actually_ worthy
is published. Ergo, if we need to cite anything, we mostly just need to look
through our journal.") If that is actually true, then the editor is justified
in heavily citing from their own journal. :)

~~~
qiqing
In theory, the journal could also tell authors who have submitted articles
that their submissions don't have enough citations. And to go back and revise
until they do. That wouldn't be so entirely out of the ordinary.

------
qiqing
First paragraph:

"The Journal of Criminal Justice has been on a roll. Once considered a
somewhat middling publication — not in the same league as top journals like
Criminology and Justice Quarterly — it is now ranked No. 1 in the field
according to its impact factor, which measures the average number of citations
a journal receives and is meant to indicate which titles are generating the
most..."

It sounds like the tl;dr is: the incentives created by how 'impact factor' is
measured caused the journal to game the system by citing itself ad nauseum.

------
sageabilly
Only avaliable to subscribers.

------
mizzao
The publisher that couldn't stop paywalling itself...

~~~
psykovsky
Who? :P

