(courtesy of medinfo)

The article in the Wall Street Journal, "Science Journals Artfully Try To Boost Their Rankings" describes some of the "questionable" steps journals do to artificially increase the impact factor.

Some methods are:

• Ask authors to cite papers the journal already has published - An editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine emailed a well known author that his submitted paper was "basically fine" but it should cite more studies that had appeared in the respiratory journal.
• Published a lot of review articles - It is usually easier for scientists to cite one review article, which summarizes recent findings, rather than the dozens of individual studies. The review then gets a lot of citations which helps the journal's impact score.
• Running annual summaries of their most notable papers - Artificial Organs did this in 2005 and all 145 citations were to other Artificial Organs papers.
• Limit citations to papers published by competitors, keeping the rivals' impact factors down -Publishers say that don't limit citations to their competition but they sometimes ask authors to "ensure that the relevant literature is cited."

Now I know why some science journals pay authors to write review articles. I was stunned the other day to hear a friend of mine tell me that she and her co-authors were going to get paid $10/page for a review article which ended up being about 40 pages long. She must of seen the shock on my face and she said that it was common for many of the science journals to pay for reviews. Well no wonder.