Coercive Citations

During the peer-review process for academic journals, authors might be asked to review and include additional references in their manuscript, especially when the reviewers and the editor feel that the authors might have overlooked existing work that is relevant to the research topic. The request to add relevant citations is generally considered to be reasonable when the discussion of this work results in an improved manuscript.

However, not all requests for additional citations are in the spirit of improving the manuscript. Coercive citations are requests by a journal’s editor to add citations that reference papers in recent issues of the same journal that bear little relevance to the research topic or that are not necessary to improve coverage of the topic. Consequently, the request to add ...