Retraction Watch continues to provide human insights into the citadel of Science. Here’s the latest to catch my attention:
Readers who follow scientific publishing will know the term “citation stacking” — as a profile-boosting technique, we’ve seen journals ask authors to cite them, and individual scientists work together to cite each other, forming “citation cartels.” And now, we’ve seen a university do it.
A university in Malaysia has instructed its engineering faculty to cite at least three papers by their colleagues; the more citations a university accrues, the better its ranking in many international surveys. We obtained the original notice, dated August 3 and released by the University of Malaya …
It’s unsettling. Is it unethical? I’m not really sure, but I do feel that, without such artificial forces as this one, the form of science would be different. As citations are a measure of importance for science papers, a proxy if you like, I might take this as a form of cheating. You’d like to think papers would stand on their own and could be evaluated on some pristine and objective standard, but since these papers are written and evaluated by subjective creatures, it’s rather inevitable that we are insufficient to the task of objective evaluation, inasmuch our ability to evaluate reality in all its startling detail is exceptionally limited and even false, so instead we must use the equivalent of a group evaluation, and the convenient approach is to count up citations. However, one would hope a citation is an honest citation, limited in origination to the realm of science, and excluding the irrelevant realm of human prestige.
So, yeah, I think the action by the University of Malaya is unethical.
