To earn their degrees, graduate students at the University of Technology in Baghdad not only must publish research in indexed journals. They also are required to cite articles in their school’s own publications, a document obtained by Retraction Watch shows.
Experts who reviewed the document called the citation requirement “deceptive and despicable” and said it could carry a steep price for the journals involved, one of which is indexed in Scopus.
Coercive citation is widespread in academia and can help boost the rankings of publications, institutions and individual researchers. The practice is considered unethical and may trigger heavy penalties.
The document we obtained shows the University of Technology has made coercive citation official policy. In an order sent July 7 to all of the school’s colleges, the university, one of Iraq’s largest public institutions, set out a number of graduation requirements for its students.
Master’s students must publish one research paper in a journal indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus or Clarivate’s Web of Science, two influential databases, or two papers in conference proceedings Scopus has indexed, according to the document. Doctoral students must publish two or more works in indexed journals as well as one paper in one of the school’s six titles or a “partner journal.”
For these articles to be approved by the school, both master’s and Ph.D. students must cite three research papers published in the university’s journals.
The order came on the heels of a meeting in the spring during which the school’s leadership discussed ways to get its journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science. One suggestion was to “increase citations of published research,” according to a news report on the institution’s website.
So far, only one of its publications, the Iraqi Journal of Architecture and Planning, is indexed in Scopus.
Professor Khawla Salah Khashan, assistant president for scientific affairs at the school, who signed the order and was also present at the spring meeting, did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the school.
‘Deceptive and despicable’
John Ioannidis, a bibliometrics expert at Stanford University, called the citation requirement “a horrible idea” likely aimed at boosting the rankings of the university journals.
“I cannot see any scientific justification,” Ioannidis told us. ”If these journals are indexed in databases that produce Impact Factor or related metrics, this alone may be good reason to remove them.”
Lennart E. Nacke, a professor of human-computer interaction and associate director of graduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who has written about citation manipulation and how to fight it, echoed Ioannidis’s concerns.
”Requiring students to include three citations to papers from university-owned journals is a predatory practice and hits the most vulnerable academic population: Students, who have yet to complete their graduate degrees,” he told us. ”It sets a wrong precedent and is deceptive and despicable.”
An Iraqi academic told us that, to their knowledge, at least one other public institution in the country formally requires students to cite school publications to graduate. More broadly, asking students and faculty members for citations is ”common practice” in Iraq and helps journals ”elevate citations and be indexed in Scopus,” according to the source.
The academic, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, highlighted two recent Facebook posts illustrating such citation shenanigans. In one, the editor-in-chief of a university engineering journal openly promised an appreciation letter from the institution’s dean to researchers who cited the publication’s papers in Scopus-indexed journals.
In the other, a screenshot shows what appears to be a sloppily redacted email from Alaa H. Al-Charrakh, chief editorial adviser at the Scopus-indexed Medical Journal of Babylon and a professor at the University of Babylon, to a researcher who submitted a paper to the journal. In the correspondence, Al-Charrakh requested the addition of three references to papers previously published in the journal, apparently as a condition for accepting the manuscript.
Al-Charrakh told us more than 3,000 papers had been submitted to the journal over the past two years and said he did “not remember writing a letter with this content.”
“In general,” he said, “the journal’s editorial board does not compel researchers to cite research previously published in the journal but rather asks them (optionally) to make a citation if the research topic is repeated in the journal, as follows: ‘It is preferred to make citations for at least 2 references to the Medical Journal of Babylon relevant to your study (if any).’”
In addition to citation manipulation, Iraqi scholars say fake authorship and research fraud are common in the Middle Eastern nation, which has a massive problem with corruption at all levels of society. Part of the reason is a lack of funding that leaves students with few options to comply with their institutions’ demands for publications (Iraq spends just 0.04% of its gross domestic product on research and development, according to the World Bank). Faculty members are in a similar bind: To be allowed to teach, the Iraqi government requires them to achieve annual performance scores that depend heavily on research published in indexed journals.
Earlier this month, we wrote about Hayder Abed Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, who has lost six papers with signs of paper mill involvement. In an interview for that story, Dhahad, who also is a professor and vice president for scientific affairs and higher education studies at the University of Technology, denied wrongdoing and stressed his ministry’s commitment to research integrity. He did not reply to a request for comment on his school’s citation requirements.
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Hope Iraqi grad students understand one thing: committing research misconduct in order to publish a paper is not worth at all, because it will be retracted in future