2 publishers accused of excessive self-citation

Two big scholarly publishers of open-access research—meaning free to read outside a paywall—have been accused of excessively citing papers previously published in their own journals. A study published in May before peer review on the preprint server SocArXiv suggests that high self-citation rates may have inflated the journal impact factor (JIF) of titles published by MDPI and Frontiers in recent years. The study authors investigated the citation patterns of 8,360 journals published by 20 of the largest for-profit academic publishers from 1997 to 2021. They found that papers published by Frontiers and MDPI titles contain more self-citation than other publishers' journals do. Citations are important in academia because they are used to calculate metrics like the JIF, which is often incorrectly used to judge researchers and their work. "The propensity to self-cite is pretty similar among all journals from all publishers except Frontiers and MDPI, which are two clear outliers,"