Due to evidence of article citation manipulation, 17 scientific journals were excluded from the 2024 edition of Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a list published by Clarivate Analytics that determines the impact of 21,848 journals from 112 countries, often used to signify a journal’s prestige. Clarivate reported that the journals were not included due to “anomalous citation patterns” capable of distorting performance by artificially inflating their impact factors (IF), a metric that reflects the number of citations received by the articles in a journal. The impact factor of 50 achieved by the journal Nature, for example, means that in 2023, the articles published by the journal in the previous two years were each cited in other articles an average of 50 times — providing a measure of the title’s influence in the scientific community.
The suppressed journals will be eligible to return to the list next year and their content will remain indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science (WoS) database. Six of the journals were excluded due to apparent abuse of self-citations, which occurs when papers excessively cite other articles published by the same journal. The most dramatic cases involved the Indian veterinary sciences journal Exploratory Animal and Medical Research and the Azerbaijani petroleum engineering journal Socar Proceedings, in which nearly 90% of references were self-citations.
The other 11 titles were excluded due to evidence of alleged citation collusion, in which two or more journals cite each other’s articles in high volume in a combined attempt to benefit all or some of them. Three Italian medical journals published by Edizioni Minerva Medica were penalized for this reason. According to Clarivate data, around 30% of citations in Panminerva Medica and Minerva Medica were of articles in Gazzetta Medica Italiana Archivio per le Scienze Mediche.
In some cases, the suspicions of collusion were not based solely on anomalous citation behavior. Two journals punished for collusion — Elsevier’s Information Sciences and Springer’s Granular Computing — have the same editor in chief: Witold Pedrycz, a Polish researcher from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada. According to Clarivate, the citations in 12 articles published in Information Sciences in 2023 caught the attention of those responsible for compiling the JCR, ultimately leading to the decision to remove the two journals from the list for a year.
Some publishers vehemently contested the decision. Robert Mendelsohn, an economics professor at the Yale School of the Environment and editor in chief of Climate Change Economics, another journal excluded for collusion, attempted to explain why articles in his journal so frequently cited papers from Springer’s Environmental Science & Pollution Research, which also lost its impact factor for a year. “Clarivate said the pattern was unusual for an economics journal and therefore suspicious. We tried to explain that our journal was focused on climate change and that it was important to link the economic studies to natural science. Clarivate apparently did not care and gave us a year to change our ways. Keeping climate change studies anchored in natural science, however, is important. So we are not changing our citation policies,” Mendelsohn told the Retraction Watch website. Clarivate states that the journal was removed due to the detection of patterns that compromise the accuracy of the impact factor, but that it makes no judgment on their origin. “We do not presume a motive or accuse these journals of wrongdoing,” a company spokesperson said in an email to Retraction Watch.
Catherine Liu, a publisher for Elsevier, complained about the suppression of Resources Policy, a mining and fossil fuels journal accused of exchanging citations with two other titles, Annals of Financial Economics and Cuadernos De Economía. According to Liu, although both journals have increased their citations, the benefit for Resources Policy was very small, reflecting the fact that there was no bad faith on her part. She noted that the articles in Resources Policy that cited papers from the two other journals are being reviewed and may be retracted or corrected to remedy the problem.
The Ukrainian Journal for Physical Optics, published by LLC Publishing, was removed from the JCR because its articles were cited so heavily in papers from another publication called Optik. Rostyslav Vlokh, editor in chief of the Ukrainian journal and a professor at the University of Latvia, said his journal has no control over Optik’s editorial decisions and called Clarivate’s response “a bit hasty.” He highlights that the citations involved articles by many authors, making it impossible to prove or deny any collusion. The journal Activities, Adaptation & Aging was penalized for self-citation. Its editor in chief, Lim Weng Marc, said the journal focuses on a specific niche in gerontology and has published few articles in recent years — just 17 in 2021, 18 in 2022, and 28 in 2023. Marc believes the small number of papers may have led to a high proportion of self-cited articles.
In 2023, only four journals were punished with temporary exclusion from the JCR, but that does not necessarily mean that fraudulent behavior has increased since then. The total number of journals covered by the JCR also grew significantly this year with the incorporation of two new databases, which makes it difficult to draw comparisons with 2023. Clarivate also found a number of serious issues with journals in the WoS database last year (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 327), which led to even more serious punishments than temporary exclusion from the JCR. At least 50 journals previously removed from the list were reevaluated by the company and were then disqualified from the WoS database due to irregularities, such as manipulation of peer review in special editions.
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