The Making of a Citation-Conscious [or Citation-Obsessed] Society

    Citations and IFs heavily depend on the citation behavior of individual scientists and vary from discipline to discipline [1,11]. Some of the intentional misuse that can skew citations and IFs include avoiding citing competitors, extensive self-citing, “citation padding” (scholars citing each other to boost their citation numbers), citation bias (for example, not citing articles by authors from some countries), or copying (plagiarizing) citations from other articles. As people tend to read papers from higher-ranking journals, such papers are more likely to be cited, which will also increase the IFs of these journals. While SCI makes it easy for researchers to find literature on past research by looking at the citations included in articles, it allows doing it without making a big effort. Mike Kessler, at ISI, looked at the similarities between individual papers in terms of what these papers were citing [21]. He used the term “bibliographic coupling” to measure similarities between individual papers. For example, if Paper A cites a group of papers in common with the papers cited in Paper B, papers A and B have something in common. If the two papers have 100% bibliographic coupling (i.e., both articles cite the same citations), this could suggest a case of plagiarism. Copying citations from other articles could lead to the marginalization of some papers in the field in favor of others. Biased citations, if copied by others, could perpetuate a distorted view of past research.Other factors that could influence citation counts are the online availability of articles and continued citing of articles retracted from journals.    SCI and IFs have caught the attention of those who direct the course of scientific research. Academic administrators closely monitor bibliometric and citation patterns to make strategic and funding decisions. Garfield has often argued against using SCI in science policy, because SCI was designed only for information retrieval [1]. Some governments even provide monetary incentives to researchers who publish in highly ranked international journals, particularly in Science and Nature [9]. As Garfield has always pointed out, it is inappropriate to apply the IF of a journal to an individual article published in it, because the article may have never been cited. What matters, he said, is the citation count for an individual article and not the IF of the journal.   As it takes time to accumulate citations and have papers published in high-impact journals, the existing criteria for getting positions and funding are unfavorable to researchers at an early stage of their careers. Kun shows how the advantage of heritage, social status, and good education are likely to secure successful careers. He is also concerned that the “publish or perish” principle could lead to “… an excessive focus on the publication of groundbreaking results in prestigious journals. But science cannot only be groundbreaking, as there is a lot of important digging to do after new discoveries—but there is not enough credit in the system for this work, and it may remain unpublished because researchers prioritize their time on the eye-catching papers, hurriedly put together” [9]. The pressure to publish quickly in high-impact journals could tempt researchers to engage in unethical practices, most common of which are plagiarism and the fabrication of results. As pointed out by many authors, the number of incidents of scientific fraud is increasing [9,22,23,24]. Retraction Watch, a web site monitoring the retraction of articles from scientific journals, shows that even reputable journals had to retract articles because of authors’ misconduct [25].   

Facilitating the Globalization of Science

Through his writings and the selection of journals for the SCI, Garfield actively promoted English as the lingua franca of science and became a powerful force in the globalization of research. Many of his essays, as well as his articles in The Scientist were devoted to convincing the world that science needs a common language and that this language should be English (Figure 6). The selection of journals for the SCI and SSCI favors English-language journals, which has worked against content published in other languages.                        Figure 6. An article by Eugene Garfield promoting English as the international language of science published in The Scientist magazine. Reproduced with permission from The Scientist.   Garfield’s efforts to promote English have not always been welcomed by other countries. In an article that he published in the French journal La Recherche, he attributed the low citation rate of French articles to the fact that French researchers publish their work in French (Figure 7a). This conclusion and the provocative title of the article (“Is French Science Too Provincial?”) caused a storm in the academic and political circles in France in the 1970s. A former prime minister of France, Michel Debré, angrily responded to Garfield’s challenge and called it a “linguistic imperialism”. The French reacted by launching a new multi-language chemistry journal (Figure 7b).     Having English as the dominant language of science has its pros and cons. We have one language in which we can easily communicate with peers from other countries. This gives, though, native speakers of English the benefit of writing and speaking in their own language that they learned when they were kids, while all others have to make an enormous effort to learn it. In an environment where there is a fierce competition for publishing in top-tier journals, non-native speakers have to spend time learning how to write in English, while native speakers could use that time to do research. Many articles are rejected from scholarly journals just because of their poor English. Gingras and Khelfaoui [27] assessed “the significance of a parameter that is seldom taken into account in evaluation studies: the existence of a USA comparative citation (visibility) advantage built in the database [SCI] and thus affecting countries that collaborate more with the USA than with other countries”. They analyzed “… how this USA citation advantage affects the measure of the scientific impact (usually measured through citations received) of major countries …”. They concluded that, “… given the strong presence of the USA in the WoS database, the comparative rankings tend, by construction, to give a citation advantage to countries having the closest relation to that country.”   In his book, Scientific Babel [28], Michael Gordin discussed the evolution of scientific languages and how English became the dominant language of science. Until the early 20th century, scientific writing was evenly split between English, French, and German. When America emerged as a global scientific power after World War II, English gradually became the dominant language of scientific communication [28,29]. Garfield contributed to the wider use of English as the international language of science. The top scientific journals are now published in English, and the official language of most conferences is English. Citation networks based on SCI connect researchers and allow them to find new partnerships.   Garfield’s vision for the future of science, scientific communication, and information technology has become a reality, but he could not have foreseen some of the unexpected ramifications of his ideas and their impact on the global scholarly ecosystem, where fierce competition for publishing in high-impact journals and obsession with citations and impact factors would permeate so deeply the culture of research.

References

1. Baykoucheva, S. From the Science Citation Index to the Journal Impact Factor and Web of Science: Interview with Eugene Garfield. In Managing Scientific Information and Research Data; Baykoucheva, S., Ed.; Chandos Publishing: Sawston‎, CA, USA, 2015; pp. 115–121. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/19169
2. Garfield, E. “Science Citation Index”—A New Dimension in Indexing. Science 1964, 144, 649–654, doi:10.1126/science.144.3619.649.
3. Prathap, G. Eugene Garfield: From the metrics of science to the science of metrics.