Absolute shots fired.
From: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319924043957
[#]Science #Academia #PeerReview #Research
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@xtaldave: WTF? How deep has academia sunken that this was necessary?
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@xtaran personally, I would have pushed back to the handling editor and told them these citations weren't going to happen, but this is a fun riposte which (a) probably makes it clear who the reviewers are and (b) hopefully encourages them never to pull this shit again.
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@xtaldave @xtaran
Recently for a review paper, one #referee suggested about 25 citations, with 22 having one (very prominent) author in common and 2 others by former group members of this prominent author.
Even more friendly, in the review they were all mentioned by #PubMed Id only.
For the 25th one, there was probably a typo in the ID, as it was a 1970s paper even more utterly unrelated.
One of the 22 was a popular science review paper on film-making in the field of #biophysics.
1/2
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@xtaldave @xtaran
The person has 154097 citations, according to #Scholar.
What I did is:
Still, I yielded to my co-authors and we added a couple of not-so-irrelevant papers from the list.
[#]scientificPublishing #peerReview
2/3
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@xtaldave @xtaran
But the only reason I felt free to do that was that this was an invited review in a special issue. Else, we'd probably have decided to yield much more.
Recently, an editor at a #PLOS journal also suggested 3 refs (against explicit PLOS policy) including 2 of their own which were very marginally relevant. My co-authors urged me to comply, which I did for one of the two.
[#]peerReview #scientificPublishing
3/3
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@jocelyn_etienne @xtaran
It shouldn't happen, but in an ego-driven system, it does, and reviewers do have a habit of exploiting it.
See also - over self-citation.
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@xtaldave @jocelyn_etienne @xtaran not just ego - for many researchers getting cited means getting their careers boosted.
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@mbpaz @xtaldave @jocelyn_etienne: Indeed. It's quite sad that the pure number of how many citations a researcher gets is treated as quality indicator. Which explains that behaviour (of the reviewers) in the initial posting very well.
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@xtaran @xtaldave @jocelyn_etienne "I review your paper, so add citations to my articles" should be considered straight blackmail.
In fact, any explicit suggestion to cite any specific article at all should be considered blackmail. Reviewers can (should) demand that statements in an article are clearly either the author's own, or based on previous research and then the source cited. But requesting the author to cite a specific article is a huge red flag.
[#]scientificPublishing #peerReview
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@mbpaz @xtaran @xtaldave
requesting the author to cite a specific article is a huge red flag.
I disagree with that, as a reviewer I very often recommend citing some papers which are all to easy to make disappear from the scene: the problems of #peerReview have their equivalent with some authors, who'll eg rather cite their own review rather than original papers, or simply ignore part of the literature.
Maybe it's research field-dependent, but I'd say valid at least for biology & physics.
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@jocelyn_etienne @xtaran @xtaldave I humbly disagree. It's up to the author to cite the sources s/he has used. The reviewer can say "you lack citations for that statement" or "the articles you cite are not the original sources, please cite the original articles instead". But asking the author to include a specific citation is similar to asking for a specific conclusion. Not the reviewer job, for a good reason.
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@mbpaz
I can give an example why I disagree: among the ideas of that prominent researcher who acted as referee, there's one very good idea that he and others supported with experiments.
Turns out there's a flaw in those, because there's an unexpected side effect that ruins the conclusions. That's been known for 15+ years, but :
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@mbpaz
But maybe you are more acquainted to formal sciences (maths, logics, computing) than natural sciences ? Then I guess the issue can be different, since you are entitled to build your own work from your chosen premises, as long as this is clear.
But even then: what if you re-create, say, Euclidean geometry but don't cite Euclid? Isn't that a problem? Or you have reviewed Euclid's work previously and only cite your own review from now on?
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@jocelyn_etienne If the author re-creates Euclidean geometry without citing Euclid, the reviewer should say "you're recreating Euclidean geometry without properly citing prior art and sources", and not "you must add a citation to [EUCLID-350]".
It's about the reviewing process, not the branch of science.
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@mbpaz
Well taking a major author was probably not making it a good example.
I rather meant that the research of less-well known authors is often made disappear by more prominent authors and groups. So it can be important to insist that not just the original papers from the usual gang are cited by members of the usual gang.
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