Peer reviewers more likely to approve articles that cite their own work

"The study was inspired by anecdotes from authors who cited articles only because reviewers asked them to, says study author Adrian Barnett, who researches peer review and metaresearch at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Sometimes, these requests are fine, he says. But if reviewers ask for too many citations or the reason to cite their work is not justified, the peer-review process can become transactional, says Barnett. Citations increase a researcher's h-index, a metric reflecting the impact of their publications."

"Requesting unnecessary or unjustified requests for citations, sometimes called coercive citation, is generally considered poor practice. Balazs Aczel, a psychologist who studies metascience at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, says that the latest work isn't the first to investigate reviewers asking for citations, but that the number of peer reviews included and level of analysis is novel. A barrier to studying the practice is a lack of data sharing from publishers, he says."

"The preprint considered articles from four publishing platforms - F1000Research, Wellcome Open Research, Gates Open Research and Open Research Europe - that make all versions of their articles publicly available, as well as reviewer comments. The publishers ask reviewers to approve articles, reject or approve them with reservations. Reviewers are also asked to explain why they ask authors to cite their own work."

Analysis of 18,400 manuscripts from four open-access platforms found that reviewers whose own work was cited in subsequent versions were more likely to approve manuscripts than reviewers who were not cited. Platforms that publish all versions and reviewer comments enabled assessment across roughly 37,000 reviews, where 54% approved with no changes and 8% rejected. Nearly 5,000 revised manuscripts cited a reviewer. Citation requests to include reviewers' work can sometimes be appropriate, but excessive or unjustified requests can make peer review transactional and inflate citation-based metrics such as the h-index. Limited publisher data sharing hinders broader investigation.

Read at Nature