On Publication Ethics—Journals, Please Get Rid of Wording Restrictions That Include Citations

Abstract

“Damn, they didn't cite me!” Do you know this feeling? Honestly, I have experienced such a wave of anger and disappointment quite often when reading papers close to my field. In some cases, I felt so wronged that I sent a friendly email to the authors reminding them of my work. Maybe they just did not know about it? Maybe they did a poor job of searching for the relevant literature? Or they thought my work was not of sufficient quality to be cited? Or is it that I keep choosing the wrong keywords so that no one can find my studies? I am sure, others will have thought the same about some of my papers, that is I did not cite their work even though it was relevant.

There are many reasons why relevant publications are not cited. In the worst case, it can be scientific misconduct, that is authors deliberately fail to cite other people's work when they know it is relevant and should be cited. I am convinced, however, that this is only a minority of cases. In recent decades, the number of scientific studies (and journals) has kind of exploded, making it difficult to keep up with developments even within one's own field. Combined with a poor literature search, this can lead to the omission of relevant work. Further, instead of searching for relevant literature themselves, many people rely on reviews, but this means that the quality of the respective review determines whether readers find the relevant literature to cite. Plus, there may be a good number of other reasons why studies are not cited, but I want to focus on one important cause that is in the responsibility of publishers.

Many journals, especially such with a high impact, have word limits for their articles. In principle, this is fine, as it forces authors to write in a concise and focused manner. However, the word limit often includes the references. In my view, this is plain wrong and should never happen. When the word limit includes references, it is of course much easier for authors to shorten their articles simply by omitting references rather than by reducing their text: eliminating 10 or so references can easily save 150 and more words. In other cases, journals do not include citations in their word limit, but instead they limit the allowed number of references as such. This basically means that the journal forces authors to actively exclude potentially relevant references. In the worst case, such a reference limit is even requested for review articles, whose main purpose should be to provide an overview by including ideally all of the relevant citations.

Sometimes, the authors of articles that did not cite my work responded to my emails. In a few cases, they stated that they were not aware of my work and were grateful that I had brought it to their attention. In most cases, however, they said that they had to focus on the most relevant citations because of word limits or restrictions on the number of citations allowed. And of course, they and I may disagree about what are the most relevant papers to cite…

So, what to do? In the past, journals may have had better reasons to argue for word limits that include citations. Printing costs were high, and individual journal issues had to be kept within a printable range. But in the age of online publishing, does it really matter if the PDF has one or two extra pages of references? I think not! Reputable journals should skip the word limit for citations or restrictions with regard to the number of citations allowed.

Finally, what can we do as individual researchers? First of all, we should not take wording restrictions for granted. Usually, journal editors will make exceptions if you give good reasons (albeit some high impact journals may not). But there is more we can do. If you are a member of a scientific society that owns or publishes a journal with word limits including citations, talk to the society's board and to the editors of the journal. It should not be a big deal to change rules that encourage (unintended) scientific fraud and leave many people wondering why their relevant papers have not been cited. Needless to say, Ethology has no such wording restrictions…

Wolfgang Goymann is the Editor-in-Chief of Ethology and author of this article. WG was excluded from all editorial decisions related to the publication of this article.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.