This paper has been circulating on social media thanks to the unscrupulous request of one of the referees and the authors' blunt response:
A lot of the comments I've seen about this example demonstrate a lack of understanding about how peer review works.
It is never the reviewers who accept or reject papers - it is the editor who does so, based on advice provided by the referees.
The editor knows the identity of the referees.
The editor knows if a referee is asking for a bunch of irrelevant self-citations.
The editor knows not to base their decision to accept or reject the paper based on such self-serving comments.
While the authors' response in this case is amusing and made their paper go viral, it puts both the journal and the authors in a bad light. As one of my collaborators said once, "shitty referee reports will produce a stinky smell extending to our work." Anyone can see here that the referees were more interested in boosting their citations than evaluating the scientific merits of the work, so the paper might as well be preprint that has not undergone peer review.
The correct response is to explain to the editor why the requested citations are irrelevant and leave them out of the revised manuscript. Don't cave in to blackmail.
On one hand, the authors could have done things the right way, alerted the editor, and relied on the editor's (a priori unknown) tact and integrity to handle the situation. On the other hand, they can memeify the situation and make their paper famous!
ReplyDeleteObviously, we have a problem if more authors start doing the same thing, but at the moment it's net positive IMO.
It will be interesting to see whether going viral translates to more citing papers. Unfortunately this journal doesn't provide data on the number of article views and downloads.
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