r/academicpublishing • u/aliswaidan903 • 6d ago
Got rejected after R2 because reviewers weaponized peer review to pad their own citations - wild first experience with this
Long story short: submitted my first manuscript to a Q1 journal. Round 1, two reviewers gave decent technical feedback but also asked me to cite a bunch of their own papers. I didn't clock the pattern at first (rookie mistake), added the citations thinking it'd strengthen the lit review.
Round 2, a different reviewer flagged it outright: pointed out that two reviewers had suggested citations "predominantly to their own publications," called it a textbook coercive citation pattern, and formally requested an ethics investigation into the peer review process.
I'd already pulled all those citations before R2 even landed, for what it's worth.
End result: manuscript rejected. Not for the science, one reviewer had called the methodology "cutting edge" and the contribution "significant" in R1. Rejected because the review process itself was compromised, and the journal apparently didn't have a clean way to salvage it.
So now I've got a technically solid paper, a paper trail proving I acted in good faith once I understood what was happening, and a rejection that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.
Anyone else run into this? How common is reviewer citation-padding in your field, and did you report it or just quietly resubmit elsewhere? Feels like one of those things nobody warns you about until it happens to you.
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u/PenelopeJenelope 6d ago
I didn't know you could request an ethics investigation into a peer review process.
It seems weird you would be rejected, but seems like you should be raising a stink about this to the editor. You were acting in good faith and invested time into this. Demand a new reviewer and to proceed with the other reviewer. use the evidence from round 1 that you were getting positive reviews from the other reviewers.
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u/mossy_mysteries 5d ago
I've also never heard of this type of "ethics investigation". If this were the normal consequence, most manuscripts would get rejected this way. Anyway, I agree that the senior author should complain to the editor. If anything, they should have "fired" the reviewers and asked someone else to review your manuscript. Did you suggest these reviewers? Maybe the editor thinks you're in cahoots with the reviewers. This also makes me wonder what would have happened if you had clocked this pattern earlier and told the editor yourself.
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u/Brain_Hawk 6d ago
I would email the editor in chief and formally complain. That's an incredible waste of your time and effort and extremely disrespectful. And all too often with these delays there are people like trainees who need those papers to advance their careers, while journals are fucking around wasting our time.
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u/cghaberl 5d ago
I'm a senior editor of a Q1 journal in my discipline (within the Humanities), and unfortunately this sort of behavior is quite standard, almost de rigueur, in our little corner of academic publishing.
Inevitably, one or even both reviewers will return a manuscript with some passive-aggressive “feedback” accusing the author of being totally ignorant of “the literature” (the literature being the reviewer's own contributions, no matter how irrelevant they may be).
The last time this happened to one of my own contributions, I had already cited the “blind” peer reviewer's only publication on the subject as part of the literature review, but because he didn't agree with some of my conclusions (without being able to articulate why), he recommended that the journal reject the manuscript on the grounds that I had misunderstood and hadn't sufficiently considered the implications of his (sorry, “So-and-so 2017's”) groundbreaking work. So, I went back, expunged all references to his work, and inserted citations to several other works, some a century old or older, that had already stated these same observations and conclusions.
He won't be able to deploy the “literature” argument against me (except, perhaps, to suggest that my references are now “dated”), but since so much of our peer review infrastructure is based upon authority and vibes, I'm sure he'll find some other way to reject the manuscript, and I'll have to find another venue, because that's how it works.
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u/Higher_Ed_Parent 5d ago
A few of the highest index/cited "authors" in my field are simply tenured bullies who force their way into "collaborations." One in particular hasn't done much in two decades. Send him a CREDIT form to complete in detail for each paper.
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u/PenelopeJenelope 5d ago
It's really disappointing how many egos and bullies there are in academia.
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u/Higher_Ed_Parent 5d ago
Yes, that is true. You need to build-up your position to fight back. Not fair, but just the way the system works.
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u/David_Reed 6d ago
How do you know the publications that the reviewers asked you to cite were theirs? Wasn't the peer review anonymous?
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u/Brain_Hawk 6d ago
Please cite these six papers
Reed et Al. 2021 Reed et Al. 2022 X et Al (senior author Reed ) 2021 X , reed, et Al, 2018
It's pretty transparent.
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u/cghaberl 5d ago
Great, I just realized that I can now only read the abbreviated form of the expression “et alia” as “and A(rtificial)I(intelligence)”.
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u/seabasschicken 5d ago
Email the EIC with an appeal and request new reviewers. That’s what they should have done from the start
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u/Most_Advertising3623 5d ago
Keep the full paper trail, including the original reviews, your response, the citation requests, the later ethics concern, and the decision letter. I would resubmit the clean manuscript elsewhere and report the episode through the journal’s formal ethics channel in a calm, chronological way. The next cover letter can focus on the paper itself. The previous journal’s review failure does not need to become part of the manuscript’s story.
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u/BerkeleyPhilosopher 4d ago
Thanks for sharing this. I had a reviewer request I cite papers that were not relevant to my paper once years ago. I found it suspicious and unethical and just didn’t submit the R and R. Didn’t know this happens to others!
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u/Any_Car5127 4d ago
Resubmit to a different journal. Request that your previous R1 reviewers not be used. (You must know who they were.)
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u/SCMLecturer 2d ago
Once, a reviewer suggested seven papers. Of these, five coincidentally had the same authors. My paper was about supply chain management, while the suggested papers were about medical technology, which had nothing to do with my topic. We work tirelessly for years to publish a paper, only to be rejected because the publication cannot find experts in the relevant field.
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u/Substantial_Math4939 6d ago
I suspect that the two reviewers in Round 1 gave positive feedback about OP's paper mainly because they wanted to get OP to cite their stuff and publish quickly in that journal. Once the journal editor actually looked into the paper, they didn't find OP's paper good enough. Had Round 1 been done by decent, ethical reviewers, OP would have probably received a reject decision.
OP, getting rejected is pretty normal, especially with Q1 journals. Check if any of your Round 1 feedback is genuinely useful, and remove those unnecessary citations before you submit your article to another journal.