Parallel Worlds of Citable Documents and Others: Inflated Commissioned Opinion Articles Enhance Scientometric Indicators

Scientometric indicators influence the standing of journals among peers, thus affecting decisions regarding manuscript submissions, scholars' careers, and funding. Here we hypothesize that impact-factor boosting (unethical behavior documented previously in several underperforming journals) should not be considered as exceptional, but that it affects even the top-tier journals. We performed a citation analysis of documents recently published in 11 prominent general science and biomedical journals. In these journals, only 12 to 79% of what they publish was considered original research, whereas editorial materials alone constituted 11 to 44% of the total document types published. Citations to commissioned opinion articles comprised 3 to 15% of the total citations to the journals within 3 postpublication years, with even a higher share occurring during the first postpublication year. An additional 4 to 15% of the citations were received by the journals from commissioned opinion articles published in other journals. Combined, the parallel world of uncitable documents was responsible for up to 30% of the total citations to the top-tier journals, with the highest values found for medical science journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Lancet) and lower values found for the Science, Nature, and Cell series journals. Self-citations to some of the top-tier journals reach values higher than the total citation counts accumulated by papers in most of the Web of Science-indexed journals. Most of the self-citations were generated by commissioned opinion articles. The parallel world of supposedly uncitable documents flourishes and severely distorts the commonly used scientometric indicators.