Retraction Watch

Clarivate, the company that calculates Journal Impact Factors based on citations to articles, didn’t publish the metric for 17 journals this year due to suspected citation manipulation. That’s a substantial increase from last year, when only four were excluded. 

The increase is, in part, case of rising tides lifting (sinking?) all boats: In its 2024 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate included an additional 7,200 journals from the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and the the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), a spokesperson for the company said, resulting in a larger number of impact factor suppressions than in past years. 

Clarivate suppressed nearly twice as many journals in 2020, when it penalized 33 for self-citation. The company suppressed 10 in 2021, and three the following year. 

I was once required to testify in a court case. My lawyer gave me a few pieces of advice, but he repeated one  several times, which may be why I remember it. “Never say never,” he said. Or, conversely, never say always. Declarations of absolutes present opposing attorneys too wide an opening. They need to identify only a single example to contradict. In trial courts, one cannot get away with making reckless absolutist claims unchallenged.

In academic scholarship, however, it happens all the time. 

Meet the dismissive literature review, in which an author at the beginning of a journal article declares the published research literature on the topic either nonexistent or so poor in quality that all of it is … dismissible. Typically, no evidence supports the claim. You’ve seen the claims yourself (e.g., “little previous research has, …” “few studies have looked at …,” “there is no research on …,” etc.). With one type of dismissive review — a firstness claim — authors boldly declare themselves to be the first in the history of the world to study a particular topic (as in, “this is the first study of …”).