We are living in highly corrupt times, and the agencies, institutions, and officials we think should do something about it — including some scientific and scholarly publishers — are either participating directly, indirectly culpable, or sadly sidelined.

The smell of Kompromat tinged with greed is in the air, and it’s alarming.

In midst of all this grim news, I was reminded that some forms of corruption can be charming — objectionable, but charming — when I came across the following post from 2012.

Of Confections and Citations, Missteps and Marzipan

Editors and publishers know how important the impact factor is, and can go to great lengths to generate more citations. Sometimes, such efforts can pay off handsomely. In one case, merely calling for a paper to be cited in its text (“This paper could serve as a general literature citation . . .”) led to more than 6,600 citations and increased the impact factor of Acta Crystallographica Section A from 2.051 to 49.926. Its next-most cited article had 28 citations.

Coercion is another approach. Citation coercion has been experienced by about 20% of academic authors, and younger faculty are more likely to succumb when editors or publishers “request” more journal citations. In these situations, it’s easy to picture editors or publishers deploying heavy-handed techniques — intimidation, threats, and directives — to browbeat young authors into pumping up impact factors with bogus self-citations.