
Signs of ‘citation hacking’ flagged in scientific papers - tdhttt
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02378-2
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not2b
I am no longer in a research role, so I do a lot less publication and reviews
than I used to. But in many cases it is perfectly legitimate for a reviewer to
ask that citations to that reviewer's work be added, because the editor has
chosen that reviewer because they are a leading expert in the field. If it's a
narrow specialty, it's quite likely that the expert has already published
relevant material that the paper submitter missed.

The key is whether the added citation is relevant or not, and that's hard to
judge based on statistics.

A more common issue I've seen is that there are cliques of academics who've
staked out some corner of a field and cite each others' work a lot, even
though it isn't that interesting. This doesn't have much to do with the review
process.

