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A lucrative seat at the table: Are editorial board members generally over-cited in their own journals?

2010; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/meet.14504701004

0044-7870

Tove Faber Frandsen, Jeppe Nicolaisen,

scientometrics and bibliometrics research

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and TechnologyVolume 47, Issue 1 p. 1-8 ArticleFree Access A lucrative seat at the table: Are editorial board members generally over-cited in their own journals? Tove Faber Frandsen, Tove Faber Frandsen tofr@litcul.sdu.dk Associate professor University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, DENMARKSearch for more papers by this authorJeppe Nicolaisen, Jeppe Nicolaisen ini@iva.dk Associate professor Royal School of Library and Information Science Birketinget 6, DK-2300 Copenhagen S., DENMARKSearch for more papers by this author Tove Faber Frandsen, Tove Faber Frandsen tofr@litcul.sdu.dk Associate professor University of Southern Denmark Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, DENMARKSearch for more papers by this authorJeppe Nicolaisen, Jeppe Nicolaisen ini@iva.dk Associate professor Royal School of Library and Information Science Birketinget 6, DK-2300 Copenhagen S., DENMARKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 03 February 2011 https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504701004Citations: 3AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Flattery citations of editors, potential referees, etc. is recurrently claimed to be a common strategy among academic authors. From a sociology of science perspective, as well as from a citation analytical perspective, it is both an interesting claim and a consequential one. Consequently, the claim deserves further analyses. The present paper presents a citation analysis of the editorial board members of four Library and Information Science journals analysed at five year intervals from 1995 to 2005. The results do not unambiguously show a tendency to give flattery citations to editors and members of editorial boards in these four journals. Furthermore, any potential effect is found to be irrelevant as the difference in citations is negligible. INTRODUCTION Early sociologists of science generally recognized that scientific conduct is governed by a particular scientific ethos, i.e., by a set of rules that are supposed to establish trust in, and guarantee the reliability of, the knowledge created in the process. This ethos was given its most succinct and influential formulation by the American sociologist Robert King Merton (1910–2003) who defined it in terms of four basic norms known as the CUDOS norms (Merton ([1942] 1973).1 Norman Kaplan's article The Norms of Citation Behaviour from 1965 is generally accepted as being the first explicit account of citing as nr'tormative behavior (e.g. Small, 1998). Kaplan (1965) held that "footnoting practices" are passed on by word of mouth from professor to student and by an examination of the varying practices of different journals. The major function of footnoting or citing is, according to Kaplan, the reaffirmation of the underlying norms of scientific behavior. About the same time as Kaplan (1965) issued his belief in citation practices being governed by an implied set of rules, Eugene Garfield (1965: 85) published a list consisting of fifteen reasons why authors cite. The list represents a mental picture of scientists being faithful disciples of the CUDOS norms. Melvin Weinstock, in his article on citation indexes in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, offers the same list of reasons why authors cite. Weinstock's introduction to the fifteen reasons is worth quoting as it precisely discloses the most basic assumption of the normative theory of citing: "Scientific tradition requires that when a reputable scientist or technologist publishes an article, he should refer to earlier articles which relate to his theme. These references are supposed to identify those earlier researchers whose concepts, methods, apparatus, etc. inspired or were used by the author in developing his own article (Weinstock, 1971: 19). According to the normative theory, failure to give credit where credit is due is unusual. Cole and Cole (1972: 370), for example, state that "sometimes […] a crucial intellectual forebear to a paper is not cited. The omission is rarely due to direct malice on the part of the author but more often to oversight or lack of awareness […]. We can assume that omitted citations to less influential work are random in nature […]". Garfield (1977: 7) concurs by declaring that "the vast majority of citations are accurate and the vast majority of papers do properly cite the earlier literature". However, in the next sentence, Garfield admits that this assertion had not been empirically substantiated: "Unfortunately, there has never been a definitive study of this assertion". The basic assumption of the normative theory of citing was not tested before the 1980's. The pioneers of this work were not adherents of the normative theory, but a group of skeptics including among others the two biologists Michael H. MacRoberts and Barbara R. MacRoberts and the information scientist Terrence A. Brooks. These skeptics challenged the basic assumption that scientists cite their influences (e.g. MacRoberts, 1997, MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1984; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1988; 1989a; 1989b; 1996; 2010; Brooks, 1985). Moreover, new lists of citer motives began to surface – lists with motives far from those ideally prescribed by the CUDOS norms (e.g., Thorne, 1977; MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 1989a; Seglen, 1992; 1997; 1998). These lists portray the citing scientist as basically egoistic, self-interested, particularistic, and prejudiced – more or less the opposite of the citer characteristics prescribed by the CUDOS norms. This quote from Seglen (1992: 636) is a telling example when compared to the Weinstock quote above: "Citations are not issued as an entirely fair and objective record of influence, but reflect both the needs and the idiosyncrasies of the citer, including such factors as utility, quality, availability, advertising (self-citation), collaboration or comraderie (in-house citations), chauvinism, mentoring, personal sympathies and antipathies, competition, neglect, obliteration by incorporation, argumentation, flattery, convention, reference copying, reviewing, and secondary referencing". One of the alleged citer motives that Seglen has brought up repeatedly is flattery. Specifically, Seglen claims that flattery citations of editors, potential referees, etc. is a common strategy among academic authors – at least common enough to be mentioned time and again (e.g., Seglen 1992; 1997; 1998). From a sociology of science perspective, as well as from a citation analytical perspective, it is both an interesting claim and a consequential one. But is it really true? Seglen himself makes no attempts to back it up by examples, empirical evidence, nor by references to others. It is, however, a claim that can be investigated empirically. One way to do this would be to investigate whether editors, editorial board members and/or referees at certain journals are frequently over-cited in those journals compared to their citation rates in comparable journals. A positive result could at least indicate that the flattery citation hypothesis had something going for it. A negative result would, on the other hand, seem to falsify the hypothesis right away. The only study of this kind that we have been able to find is a small-scale study of the quality control of a single journal in the field of Economics (Laband, Tollison & Karahan, 2002). This study investigates the citations to editors and board members of the American Economic Review (AER) by articles appearing in the AER. These results are then compared with the rate of citations to the same editors and board members in a control group of articles appearing in two comparable Economics journals. The comparisons of citation rates in 1985–1995 are mixed, and no general pattern of over-citation can be found. The final year analysed, 2000, is however, remarkable as it shows a four times greater rate of citations from AER articles than from articles in the control group. In order to test the flattery citation hypothesis further, additional research is clearly needed. We have therefore decided to test the flattery citation hypothesis in four selected LIS journals (Journal of Documentation; Journal of Information Science; Journal of the American Society for Information Science (and Technology); Library & Information Science research). The methods and procedures of the tests are described in the next section. The following section reports the results of the tests. It is followed by a final discussion and conclusions section. We hope that this paper may facilitate and initiate more research on the role of editors and editorial boards in the scientific publication process, as we agree with Cronin (2009) that this is an important, but unfortunately much neglected research area. METHODS The citations to editors and members of the editorial board of a journal can be analysed using the method suggested by Laband, Tollison and Karahan (2002). They analysed the editorial screening process in Economics with the objective of "ascertaining how well the process has functioned over time with respect to filtering "bad" papers and selecting "good" papers" (Laband, Tollison and Karahan, 2002: 315). They count the number of times the editors and editorial board members of the American Economic Review were cited in articles published in the journal itself as well as in a pool of documents comprising of articles from Journal of Political Economy and Quarterly Journal of Economics. They examine at five year intervals from 1985 to 2000 with a one year lag (P326) implying that they have four observations for AER and four for the reference sample. In this paper we employ a similar method although we expand the number of journals included in the analysis. It is important that the selected journals are representative for their discipline, since we would like our results to be as general as possible. Furthermore, it is crucial that the journals are general journals as highly specialised journals cannot be expected to cite each other extensively. For the analysis of Library and Information Science the following journals are used: Journal of Documentation (JDoc), Journal of Information Science (JIS), Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), and Library & Information Science Research (LISR). Editors and members of the editorial boards are located using the lists available in the first issue of each publication year in the printed version of the journals. Appendix 1 provides lists of the editors and editorial boards. Due to the limited number of editors in the study the sample is merged with the members of editorial boards. A future, larger study could benefit from separating the two groups as flattery citations of one group may be more common than of the other. Laband, Tollison and Karahan (2002) analyse one journal using articles from two journals pooled as a reference sample. We analyse four journals using the same four journals separately as reference samples. The journals are analysed at five year intervals from 1995 to 2005 with a one year lag providing three times four observations (12) for the journals and three times four times three observations (36) for the reference samples. The citations are found using Social Sciences Citation Index. Additional citation indexes are superfluous as we need only the publications of the journals in the analysis to be indexed. RESULTS Tables 1 to 3 presents the results of the analysis of same journal versus other journal references per article to editors and editorial board members. The number of board members varies considerably across journals as can be seen in appendix 1, and consequently the number of references needs normalisation in order to be comparable across journals. Two different approaches are being used. One is normalisation by the number of editors and editorial board members and the other is the use of indices. First, the results are presented as indices with the same journal citations set to 1. A tendency to excessively cite editors and editorial board members of the journal the article is published in would hence imply values less than one for the other journals. The table is to be read as follows: For every citation received by the editors and editorial board members of JDoc in 1995 they received 0.7 in JIS, 0.7 in JASIS and 0.1 in LISR. This indicates that the editors and editorial board members of JDoc were more cited in JDoc than in other general LIS journals. Table 1. Same journal versus other journal references per article to editors and editorial board members in 1995. Same journal citations are set to 1.0 JDoc JIS JASIS LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 1.0 0.7 0.7 0.1 JIS editors and editorial board members 2.4 1.0 0.3 0.0 JASIS editors and editorial board members 0.2 0.2 1.0 0.6 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.1 0.0 0.0 1.0 In 1995 the editors and editorial board members of one journal received more citations in other journals than it itself. For every citation received by the editors and editorial board members of JIS they received 2.4 in JDoc. In 2000 the editors and editorial board members of all four journals are excessively cited in the same journal compared to the other journals, as the indices of citations in the other journals lies between 0.0 and 0.8. In 2005 the picture depicted is somewhat ambiguous. The editors and editorial board members of two journals received more citations in other journals than in the journal itself. For every citation received by the editors and editorial board members of JIS they received 2.2 in JDoc and 2.1 in JASIST. For every citation received by the editors and editorial board members of JASIST they received 1.1 in JDoc. Consequently, in 2005 there is by no means a clear tendency to flattery. Table 2. Same journal versus other journal references per article to editors and editorial board members in 2000. Same journal citations are set to 1.0 JDoc JIS JASIS LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 1.0 0.3 0.3 0.1 JIS editors and editorial board members 0.7 1.0 0.2 0.1 JASIS editors and editorial board members 0.8 0.4 1.0 0.4 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.5 0.0 0.4 1.0 Table 3. Same journal versus other journal references per article to editors and editorial board members in 2005. Same journal citations are set to 1.0 JDoc JIS JASIST LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 1.0 0.0 0.3 0.1 JIS editors and editorial board members 2.2 1.0 2.1 0.7 JASIST editors and editorial board members 1.1 0.4 1.0 0.7 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.2 0.0 0.5 1.0 In three cases of the total 12 cases (four journals times three years) the editors and editorial board members are cited more in other journals than in the journal itself. Consequently, we can hardly say we have found evidence of flattery. Moreover, the following tables 4 through 6 can clarify the potential size of an effect. Tables 4, 5 and 6 present the number of citations to editors and editorial board members using a normalisation based on the number of editors and editorial board members. The tables present an overview of the number of citations received by each editor and member of editorial board per article and should be read as follows: In 1995 the editors and editorial board members of JDoc each received an average of 0.04 citations in JDoc, 0.03 in JIS, 0.03 in JASIS and 0.00 in LISR. As the table shows the average number of citations to the editors and editorial board members in 1995 ranged from 0.00 to 0.07. Table 4. The number of same journal versus other journal references per article per person to editors and editorial board members in 1995 JDoc JIS JASIS LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.00 JIS editors and editorial board members 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.00 JASIS editors and editorial board members 0.01 0.01 0.06 0.04 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.07 In 2000 we find only slightly increased values as the average number of citations now range from 0.00 to 0.11, cf. Table 5. Overall, the number of citations is, however, not impressing and certainly does not qualify as a primary motivation to undertake the substantial workload that comes with joining an editorial board or becoming an editor. Table 5. The number of same journal versus other journal references per article per person to editors and editorial board members in 2000 JDoc JIS JASIS LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 0.11 0.03 0.04 0.01 JIS editors and editorial board members 0.02 0.03 0.01 0.00 JASIS editors and editorial board members 0.04 0.02 0.05 0.02 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.04 0.00 0.03 0.08 Turing to the numbers in 2005, we once again observe a slight increase in the average number of citations, but they are still at very modest levels, now ranging from 0.00 to 0.14, cf. Table 6. As an interesting caveat we also see a pattern forming when comparing all the numbers in Tables 4 through 6. It is clearly is more profitable to be an editor or an editorial board member of some journals than others. JDoc editors and editorial board members thus receive citations largely from within the journal (0.04 to 0.14) but also to a certain extent from other journals (0.00 to 0.04). JIS editors and editorial board members are experiencing limited visibility in the journal itself (0.01 to 0.03), as in other journals (0.00 to 0.02). JASIS editors and editorial board members receive citations both from within the journal (0.03 to 0.06) as well as from other journals (0.01 to 0.04). Finally, LISR editors and editorial board members receive citations in LISR (0.04 to 0.08) but have only limited external visibility (0.00 to 0.04). Table 6. The number of same journal versus other journal references per article per person to editors and editorial board members in 2005 JDoc JIS JASIST LISR JDoc editors and editorial board members 0.14 0.01 0.04 0.02 JIS editors and editorial board members 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.00 JASIST editors and editorial board members 0.03 0.01 0.03 0.02 LISR editors and editorial board members 0.01 0.00 0.02 0.04 Summing up, even if there is tendency to give flattery citations, as we clearly have not been able to unambiguously determine in this analysis, the effect on the single editor or editorial board member is minimal as the average number of citations in Tables 3 through 6 are very small. The difference between e.g. 0.01 and 0.04 is more or less irrelevant since it on an annual basis can mean only one or two flattery citations for each editor or editorial board member. Discussion and conclusions That an author sometimes cites to flatter a superior, a potential referee, or the editor of the journal s/he is about to submit an article to has been known and recognized long before P.O. Seglen began to write about it. As early as in 1974 even Garfield admitted that flattery citations are a real phenomenon: "In some cases, without doubt, citations may be used for all those sullied purposes that supposedly demean its usefulness for information retrieval: flattery, padding, borrowed distinction, etc." Garfield (1974: 5) However, contrary to Seglen, Garfield (1974: 5) maintains that such cases are "the trivial exceptions". The results of our study of four selected LIS journals confirm this. Although we were not able to unambiguously determine whether flattery citations are actual or not, our results clearly show that any effect of such citations are at best minimal. We therefore conclude that the flattery citation effect appears to be inconsequential for citation analyses made on larger datasets. Yet, our study only concerns four journals representing one discipline. The flattery effect could be bigger and thus more consequential in other journals and disciplines. We intend to conduct a series of control studies including other journals and disciplines. Perhaps the risk of getting exposed as a toady sets a limit to the amount of flattery citations one can possibly bear to put in a scholarly paper. Scholarly papers have (potential) readers. Nevertheless, as discussed by Nicolaisen (2007: 625–629), this is regretfully often neglected by those who argue that citations are mostly given by the author for egoistic and self-promoting reasons. The scholarly paper has been around for about 350 years and is apparently still going strong. It is read, quoted, and used by men and women in a great many professions and societies. Would that be the case if the scholarly paper was nothing but a fraud – If citations were mainly given for egoistic and self-promoting reasons (e.g., flattery)? It is almost impossible to imagine that the scholarly paper could have survived for so long and with such success if that was the case. People would long ago have stopped reading, quoting, and using it. In other words, it would have lead to the collapse of that communication channel. Zahavi and Zahavi (1997) argue that receivers have been selected to ignore signals that are not honest and therefore are the ultimate determiners of how evolution has shaped communication. Honest signals have evolved because they take forms that require considerable cost to produce, a condition that would result in ineffective communication if the sender could not bear that cost. Zahavi (1975) referred to the costly signals as handicaps, and his theory is thus known as the handicap principle. Grafen (1990a, 1990b) has demonstrated that signals need only be honest on average to be evolutionary stable. The idea had been put forward earlier by Zahavi (1987: 319) who had recognized that deception may be possible, but only if there is a limit to the frequency of bluffing so that receivers, on average, benefit from trusting the signals: "I do not claim that cheating is never encountered in nature. Several types of mimicry seem to provide false information. It is interesting to note that in most cases mimicry is concerned with a third party mimicking a communication channel that has evolved due to the honest interaction of other parties. Such cheating can only exist when the toll it levies on that communication channel is kept within limits that render uncovering it too costly". What our results seem to suggest is that flattery citations are very low in numbers and thus only leave a small and insignificant toll on the scholarly communication system. Appendix: Appendix 1. Listing of editors and editorial board members in four LIS journals Journal of Documentation list of names used for 1995 Angela R. Haygarth Jackson Richard Kimber J.H. Ashford Sheila M. Corrall Blaise Cronin John Eyre Geoffrey Ford Alan Gomersall Dean Harrison Peter Ingwersen Maurice B. Line A. G. Mackenzie Alan E. Negus S. E. Robertson Lucy A. Tedd B. C. Vickery Peter Willett Christine L. Borgman Michael J. Brittain Sandor Daranyi Journal of Information Science list of names used for 1995 A. Gilchrist A. J. Meadows S. E. Ward W. O. Aiyepeku S. Akhtar S. Arunachalam R. T. Bottle M. Brittain A. E. Cawkell H. Clausen W. E. Curras S. Daranyi G. W. P. Davies C. Fabre de Morlhon M. Farber E. Garfield P. J. Judge R. Kuhlen Y. F. Le Codiac Liu Zhaodong M. F. Lynch T. Matsumura C. Oppenheim P. Pelou M. Pinto Molina M. F. Saksida S. Salem W. A. Turner G. Wersig Journal of the American Society for Information Science list of names used for 1995 Donald H. Kraft Lois F. Lunin Donald O. Case Robert F. Barnes William S. Cooper Irene S. Farkas-Conn Paul Kantor Robert M. Losee, Jr. Marcia J. Bates Peter Bollmann Christine L. Borgman Bert R. Boyce Terrence Brooks Charles T. Meadow Henry Small Irene L. Travis Danny Wallace Isaac Welt Peter Willett Library & Information Science Research list of names used for 1995 Peter Hernon Candy Schwartz Mary A. Burke Min-min Chang Thomas Childers Charles H. Davis Mary Dykstra Robert Hayes Paul D. Metz Paul Nicholls Jane B. Robbins Alastair Smith Stephen E. Wiberley Ann J. Wolpert Debra Shaw Journal of Documentation list of names used for 2000 Angela R. Haygarth Jackson Richard Kimber J.H. Asford Christine Borgman J. Michael Brittain Blaise Cronin Sandor Daranyi Elisabeth Davenport Geoffrey Ford Michael Heine Peter Ingwersen Maurice B. Line Graham Mackenzie Alan E. Negus S. E. Robertson Lucy A. Tedd B. C. Vickery Peter Willett Journal of Information Science list of names used for 2000 A. Gilchrist Charles Oppenheim Sandra Ward W. Olabode Aiyepeku S. Arunachalam M. Brittain A. E. Cawkell H. Clausen W. E. Curras S. Daranyi C. Fabre de Morlhon M. Farber J. Furner E. Garfield M. Grabowska Joyce Kirk R. Kuhlen Y. F. Le Codiac M. Pinto A. M. Ramalho Correia J. E. Rowley J. S. Sabaratnam S. Salem W. A. Turner G. Wersig P. Yates Mercer Journal of the American Society for Information Science list of names used for 2000 Donald H. Kraft Lois F. Lunin Terrence A. Brooks Marcia J. Bates Peter Bollmann Christine L. Borgman Bert R. Boyce Harry Bruce Donald O. Case Hsinchun Chen Michael D. Cooper Irene S. Farkas-Conn Ophir Frieder Myke Gluck Paul Kantor Ray R. Larson Robert M. Losee, Jr. Clifford Lynch Gary Marchionini Robin Peek Ron Rice Linda Schamber Henry Small Padmini Srinivasan Irene L. Travis Danny Wallace Carolyn Watters Peter Willett Library & Information Science Research list of names used for 2000 Peter Hernon Candy Schwartz Paul Nicholls Mary A. Burke Thomas Childers Lynn Silipigni Connaway Juris Dilevko Robert Hayes Gary Marchionini Jane B. Robbins Debra Shaw Alastair Smith Howard White Ann J. Wolpert Journal of Documentation list of names used for 2005 David Bawden Tatjana Aparac-Jelusic Maria E. Burke Marianna Tax Choldin Gobinda Chowdhury Nigel ford Birger Hjørland Marian Koren Julie McLeod Ramune Petuchovaite Niels Ole Pors Ian Rowlands Amanda Spink Paul Sturges Martin Svoboda Christine Urquhart Perrti Vakkari Berenika Webster Journal of Information Science list of names used for 2005 Adrian Dale Alan Gilchrist Charles Oppenheim Sandra Ward D. Allen S. Arunachalam C. Fabre de Morlhon S. Foo J. Furner E. Garfield M. Grabowska J. Kirk M. Brittain H. Clausen E. Curras S. Daranyi M. Faber (M. Fabre) M. Pinto A. M. Ramalho Correia J. E. Rowley S. Salem W. A. Turner G. Wersig Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology list of names used for 2005 Donald H. Kraft Lois F. Lunin Terrence A. Brooks Linda Schamber Bert R. Boyce Carol Barry Marcia J. Bates Peter Bollmann Christine L. Borgman Tibor Braun Harry Bruce Donald O. Case Hsinchun Chen Abdur Chowdhury Michael D. Cooper Lisa Covi Fabio Crestani Blaise Cronin Elisabeth Davenport Brenda Dervin Andrew Dillon Irene Farkas-Conn Raya Fidel M. Geoffrey Ford Ophir Frieder Myke Gluck Abby A. Goodrum Richard B. Hill Peter Ingwersen Paul Kantor Ray R. Larson Robert M. Losee, Jr. Clifford Lynch Gary Marchionini Katherine W. McCain Claire McInerney Robin Peek Ron Rice Stephen Robertson Victor Rosenberg Mark Sanderson Henry Small Padmini Srinivasan Irene L. Travis Danny Wallace Carolyn Watters Library & Information Science Research list of names used for 2005 Peter Hernon Candy Schwartz Jamshid Behesthi Thomas Childers Lynn Silipigni Connaway Juris Dilevko Lisa Given Melissa Gross Hazel Hall Mirja Iivonen Jim Jansen Chern Li Liew Gary Marchionini Ronald R. 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Universalism is the principle that truth claims should be subjected to pre-established, impersonal justification criteria that exclude consideration of particularistic criteria such as a scientist's race, nationality, class, or religion. Disinterestedness conveys the idea that scientists should seek truth objectively, without considering their individual interests. Organized Skepticism captures the norm that before results should be deemed valid, the scientific community at large should examine their reliability. Citing Literature Volume47, Issue1November/December 2010Pages 1-8 ReferencesRelatedInformation