Editorial guidance reveals strategies to identify and prevent citation manipulation during peer review, highlighting the need for coordinated oversight to protect publishing integrity.
An inappropriate request for citations (IRC) occurs when a reviewer asks the authors of the reviewed manuscript to cite multiple papers with the sole purpose of boosting the reviewer's own citation index. In the past several years, we have witnessed a steady increase of IRC cases both in terms of frequency and scope. While some relevant ethical guidelines have been provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), we feel that the problem is persistent and requires a coordinated response from editors, authors and reviewers. This article provides advice from the editors of Results in Physics for identifying and avoiding IRCs as well as for preventing the appearance of scientifically unmotivated citations in published papers.
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Vadim A. Markel (2024) studied this question.
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