Practices and Metrics of Citation in Scholarly Publishing

Overview & Synopsis

In the world of academia and research, citation (i.e. being cited and referred to) in scholarly publications is generally regarded as a primary metric for integrity and excellence. In other words, it is the currency of credibility and the gold standard for reliability. In this article we try to shed light on some of the bad and immoral/unethical practices related to citation in modern scholarly publications and activities. In fact, citation (and actually academic and scholarly activities in general including scholarly publishing) became in modern times an industry that is subject to many non-scholarly factors and considerations (whether sinister or benign), and this should be regarded as a form of corruption that threatens the integrity, authenticity and morality of the present and future of academia, research and scholarly activities (and actually human knowledge and progress in general). This threat is aggravated by the epidemic of predatory journalism and the wide availability of artificial intelligence tools which facilitate the abuse of scholarly publishing and citation practices and the manipulation of metrics and parameters related to these activities. We also discuss briefly the value and significance of academic and research metrics related to citation which are commonly used these days to evaluate scholars (as well as other scholarly entities like journals and institutes) and assess their scholarly works and ranks (noting the direct negative impact of the bad citation practices on these metrics and parameters and their supposed significance). We finally present some proposals to address the limitations, shortcomings and abuses of the existing practices and metrics related to citation.