£337 Million Built on Unpaid Labour

 

It's Time to Pay the People Who Actually Make Academic Publishing Work

Wiley just announced the acquisition of Emerald Publishing for £337 million — nearly half a billion US dollars. The deal adds almost 500 journal brands, 8,000 book titles, and decades of archived case studies and backfile content to Wiley's already formidable portfolio. Wiley's CEO called it an "outstanding strategic fit," pointing to complementary portfolios, compatible cultures, and — crucially — the proprietary content value that can now be leveraged in AI and data analytics.

It is an impressive deal by any measure. But pause for a moment and ask a simple question: who actually created that £337 million worth of content?

Not Wiley. Not Emerald. Not their shareholders.

It was the researchers, academics, and scholars who spent months — sometimes years — writing, revising, and refining their work. It was the peer reviewers who donated their expertise and evenings to evaluate manuscripts, often completing detailed reviews within tight deadlines and without a cent of compensation. It was the associate editors and editorial board members who coordinated the entire process, managing submissions, handling revisions, and making final calls on what gets published. Every journal article, every case study, every book chapter in that £337 million deal was produced by people who were never paid for producing it.

That is not a minor footnote. That is the foundational contradiction at the heart of academic publishing.

How the Model Actually Works — and Why It Is Deeply Unfair

Here is how academic publishing typically functions. A researcher — funded by a university, a government grant, or a public institution — conducts a study and writes it up. They submit it to a journal. The journal sends it to two or three peer reviewers, who are also academics, also funded by universities or public grants, who read the paper carefully and write detailed feedback. An editor, again typically an academic working voluntarily or for a token honorarium, manages the process. If accepted, the paper is typeset, formatted, and published by the journal.

The publisher then charges the researcher's institution — the very university that funded the research in the first place — a subscription fee to access the published article. In many cases, the researcher also pays an Article Processing Charge (APC) of anywhere between $1,000 and $5,000 to make their own work open access. The publisher profits at both ends.

The author receives nothing. The reviewers receive nothing. The editors receive a fraction of what their time is worth, if anything at all. Meanwhile, the publisher accumulates a content portfolio valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and sells it, licenses it, and now — as Wiley explicitly stated in its press release — uses it to fuel AI and data analytics products.

This is not a sustainable ethical arrangement. It is a system in which public money funds research, academic labour produces content, and private publishers capture the value.

The AI Turn Makes It Worse

The Wiley-Emerald deal is not just about journals and books. Read Wiley's own words carefully. The acquisition "strengthens its scale advantage in terms of proprietary content that can be used in AI and data analytics." The CEO stated plainly: "our proprietary content and data fuels AI."

In other words, the decades of academic writing that researchers produced for free is now being positioned as premium training data and AI content infrastructure — a revenue stream that will compound over years as demand for quality research content accelerates among AI models and applications.

Authors did not consent to this use. Reviewers did not consent. The academics whose intellectual labour fills those 500 journals had no say in whether their work would become the raw material for AI products generating returns for shareholders. And they will receive no share of those returns.

The music industry fought this battle and, imperfectly and incompletely, won some ground. Musicians now receive streaming royalties — fractions of a cent per play, yes, but a recognised principle that creators deserve a share when their work is used commercially. Academic authors have not won that battle. In fact, they have barely begun to fight it.

What a Fairer Model Could Look Like

The good news is that the alternative is not complicated to imagine. The infrastructure and precedent already exist in other creative industries. What is needed is the will to apply it to academic publishing.

Pay authors a royalty per download. Even a nominal amount — one cent, five cents per full-text download — would establish the principle that authors have a commercial stake in their own work. For highly downloaded papers, this would accumulate into meaningful income. For the broader research community, it would signal a fundamental shift in how academic labour is valued.

Compensate peer reviewers fairly. Peer review is skilled professional work. A thorough review of a complex quantitative paper can take four to six hours or more. Publishers who charge thousands in APCs and generate hundreds of millions in revenue can afford to pay reviewers a reasonable honorarium — $150 to $300 per review would be a reasonable starting point. Some platforms are already experimenting with reviewer recognition and compensation. The major commercial publishers, who profit most from this labour, should lead, not lag.

Reform the APC model. Charging authors to make their own publicly funded research freely available is a policy that deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. Open access is a worthy goal; extracting thousands of dollars from research budgets to achieve it is not the right mechanism.

Regulate AI licensing of academic content. If publishers are going to license academic content to AI developers and data analytics companies, there should be a clear, transparent mechanism for distributing a share of that revenue to the authors whose work is being used. This is not radical. It is standard practice in music and visual art licensing.

The Bigger Picture

Wiley acquiring Emerald for £337 million is not inherently wrong. Publishers do provide services — platforms, distribution, discoverability, editorial infrastructure. Those services have value. The problem is the extraordinary imbalance between what publishers extract and what the people who actually create the content receive.

The next time a major publishing deal is announced, and the numbers are staggering, and the CEOs talk about scale advantages and AI-driven knowledge economies, remember who is not in that press release. The PhD student who spent a year on that study. The professor who reviewed three papers last month between teaching and supervision. The editor who handled 200 submissions this year on top of their own research load.

They built that £337 million. They deserve more than a thank-you in an acknowledgements section.

When the bibliography becomes the business

A LinkedIn post circulated recently in which a researcher described what happened after they stopped cooperating with a prolific collaborator: joint work retracted, their name removed from papers where they had contributed, and a collaborator who had served as corresponding author on approximately 99% of their shared output. The post named names. This blog will not discuss about thesenames because the pattern matters more than the case.

Corresponding authorship formally exists to manage communication between a research team and a journal. In certain publishing networks it has become something else: a production management role that controls reference lists. A corresponding author who assembles the final manuscript has structural influence over which citations appear. In a network where collaborators reciprocate citations across papers, that influence compounds quickly. When multiple papers by the same cluster each carry a dozen or more self-citations, the bibliography is no longer documenting intellectual lineage. It is manufacturing it.

Self-citation stacking is not subtle. A paper carrying nineteen self-citations by a single author is arithmetically unusual. That editors rarely query this at submission — that it surfaces only after a retraction or public complaint — tells us where editorial scrutiny is actually directed: at the text, the method, sometimes the data. Rarely at the reference architecture.

Self-citation at scale is not a solo enterprise. It requires a network: co-authors who reciprocate, editors embedded in the same citation ecosystem, journals whose acceptance decisions are shaped, consciously or not, by the apparent influence of submitting authors. The loop is self-reinforcing — citation counts produce h-indices, h-indices produce editorial appointments, editorial appointments produce more acceptances. None of this requires coordination. It emerges from rational actors responding to institutional incentives. That is precisely what makes individual retraction decisions insufficient. Retracting a paper addresses a node. It does not address the network.

Publishers have been tagged in posts like this one as though a single alert will trigger action. It is worth being precise. Algorithmic screening for self-citation ratios at submission is technically feasible — some publishers have piloted it. The constraint is not technological. It is commercial. Authors who generate high citation counts are valuable to journals under current metrics. Acknowledging that tension is a prerequisite for addressing it. And for researchers who raise concerns internally, the situation is worse. Academic publishing has no formal whistleblower protection framework. A researcher removed from a paper where they contributed has, in most jurisdictions, very limited recourse. Their name disappears. The record does not.

The behaviours this post describes — citation padding, corresponding author capture, co-authorship as currency — are not aberrations. They are adaptations to a system that rewards volume and impact scores above other indicators of scholarly value. The question is not only what individuals did. It is what kind of publishing ecosystem produces these incentives reliably, and whether anyone with the power to redesign it has any interest in doing so.

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Zero Citation publishes commentary on research integrity, academic publishing, and the systems that govern scholarly work. 

Shifting the Goalposts: The FT50 Shake-Up

 

On 29 April 2026, the Financial Times updated its FT50 list of journals for the first time since 2016. Three journals — Human Relations, Journal of Business Ethics, and Organization Studies — were quietly removed and replaced by Academy of Management Annals, American Sociological Review, and Psychological Science. For the casual observer, this is a minor administrative footnote. For the thousands of business school academics who have spent years, sometimes decades, orienting their careers around this list, it is anything but.

The List That Ate Academic Life

The FT50 is not merely a bibliometric curiosity. It is, for many business schools worldwide, the operational definition of what counts as research. Tenure decisions, promotion panels, annual performance reviews, research load allocations, salary increments, and institutional rankings — all of these, in one form or another, have been filtered through the lens of fifty journal titles selected by a newspaper. At many institutions, a single FT50 publication carries more weight than three or four publications elsewhere. The list became the currency, and academics — being rational actors in a system that rewards certain behaviour — responded accordingly.

Over the past decade, it became normal for early-career researchers to be told, explicitly or implicitly, that their first job was to “get an FT50.” Not to build a body of work. Not to engage with practitioners or policymakers. Not to take intellectual risks. To target one of fifty outlets, meet their exceptionally demanding standards, and wait. The result has been a generation of scholars trained to write for a narrow audience, on narrower topics, in a narrower methodological register than their disciplines would otherwise warrant.

The Compact That Was Made — and Just Broken

Here is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this week’s announcement: an implicit compact existed between institutions and researchers. Academics were told, in hiring meetings and probation reviews, that the path to security ran through the FT50. Many of them honoured their end of the bargain. They turned down applied consulting work, declined invitations to write accessible practitioner pieces, and spent years revising manuscripts for journals on the list. Some of them built their entire identities around the intellectual communities that journals like Organization Studies and Human Relations represent.

Now those three journals are off the list. The work remains. The careers remain. But the institutional recognition — the symbolic capital that justified those choices — has been quietly reassigned. No one has been told their past publications are worthless, of course. But in a system where forward-looking incentives drive behaviour, the signal is clear: the journals you sacrificed for no longer count the same way.

This is not a small injustice. Consider the researcher who has three publications in Organization Studies and was one strong performance review away from promotion. Or the early-career scholar who spent two years revising a manuscript for Human Relations because her head of school told her it was “one of the best journals for her kind of work.” The FT50 is not just a list of journals. It is a system of incentives that shapes real careers, real families, and real lives.

The Deeper Problem: Ranking as Knowledge Policy

The FT50’s power over academic life points to a more fundamental problem: the delegation of knowledge policy to rankings. When a commercial media organisation — however prestigious — becomes the de facto arbiter of what constitutes excellent business research, something has gone wrong. The FT has no particular expertise in epistemology, no accountability to the research communities it affects, and no mandate to represent the global diversity of scholarly inquiry. Its list exists to serve a rankings product. That product, in turn, serves the interests of elite MBA programmes and the employers who recruit from them.

The criticism that the list has been too U.S.-centric, too skewed toward finance and economics, and too disconnected from non-Western research traditions is not new — it has been made for years by scholars from Europe, Asia, and the Global South. The removal of Organization Studies and Human Relations, both journals with strong traditions of critical and interpretive scholarship, and their replacement with outlets carrying higher impact factors and stronger disciplinary orthodoxy, suggests that the review process has responded to bibliometric pressure rather than scholarly breadth. More impact, less pluralism.

What the Game Looks Like From Here

So what are the rules now? That depends enormously on whether institutions treat this update as a prompt for genuine reflection or simply update their spreadsheets. The optimistic reading is that the FT50 review — which is reportedly ongoing and may incorporate citation counts, societal impact, and practitioner-facing outlets like Harvard Business Review — signals a loosening of the rigid journal-list model. That would be welcome. A system that rewards scholars for engaged, impactful, and pluralistic scholarship would be healthier than one that channels all ambition into fifty titles.

The pessimistic reading is that institutions will simply recalibrate. The pressure will not disappear — it will redirect. Researchers who built careers targeting the newly removed journals will find their institutional capital quietly diminished. Researchers targeting the newly added journals will discover just how competitive entry into American Sociological Review and Psychological Science actually is. The game continues; only the goalposts have moved.

The honest answer is that neither reading is sufficient on its own. What this moment demands is a serious institutional reckoning with the damage done by uncritical adoption of journal lists as proxies for research quality. Promotion panels should ask whether a researcher has made a genuine contribution to knowledge — not whether the journal hosting that contribution appears in a commercial ranking. Research directors should broaden their definitions of impact to include policy influence, practitioner uptake, and public engagement. And the FT itself, if it is serious about reform, should involve the scholarly communities it affects in its review process, not simply survey business schools about their preferences.

A Final Word to the Researchers in the Middle of This

If you spent years working toward a journal that is no longer on the list, your work has not lost its value. Scholarship is not made meaningful by a commercial ranking — it is made meaningful by the questions it asks, the rigour with which it pursues answers, and the communities it engages. The FT50 was always a imperfect proxy for quality. Its instability is proof of that.

The deeper question this moment raises is not which journals are on the list, but why so many institutions surrendered their academic judgment to a list in the first place. That is a conversation worth having — and one that is long overdue.

The metrics trap: When citation counts replace scholarly value

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There is a quiet crisis unfolding in universities around the world. It does not make headlines, but it shapes careers, distorts research agendas, and is steadily hollowing out entire disciplines. The crisis is this: academic institutions have outsourced their judgment to databases.

Scopus. Web of Science. h-indices. Impact factors. These tools were designed to help measure scholarly output. Instead, they have become the output itself. What gets indexed is what counts. What does not appear in a database does not exist — at least not institutionally.

The consequences are not abstract. A monograph that takes a decade to write, a translation that makes ideas accessible across languages, a poem that distills a cultural moment with more precision than any survey instrument — none of these registers meaningfully in the metrics that now govern hiring, promotion, and funding decisions at most universities globally. 

The Database as Arbiter of Knowledge

The problem begins with a category error. Citation databases were built to track scientific literature — journal articles, primarily in STEM fields, following standardised formats, published in indexed outlets. They do a reasonable job of that. The error is in assuming that this infrastructure can be extended to evaluate all forms of scholarly contribution.

It cannot.

The Humanities, the Arts, and practice-based disciplines do not produce knowledge in the same form as molecular biology. A historian's argument unfolds over three hundred pages. A choreographer's research is embodied in performance. A literary scholar's contribution might be a critical edition that restores a text to its proper context. None of these fits neatly into a journal article, and none accumulates citations the way a methods paper in a high-throughput field does.

Yet university ranking systems — QS, Times Higher Education, Shanghai — rely heavily on bibliometric data. And because institutions chase rankings, internal promotion criteria follow the same logic. The database becomes the de facto arbiter of scholarly value, even in fields it was never designed to assess.

What Gets Lost

The distortion runs deeper than unfairness to individual scholars. It changes what research gets done in the first place.

Academics are rational actors. When promotion depends on indexed publications, they write for indexed journals. When grant funding follows citation metrics, they frame research questions to fit formats that generate citations. When creative or interdisciplinary work carries no institutional reward, they abandon it — or never pursue it.

This is not a failure of individual courage. It is a structural problem. The metrics create incentives, and the incentives reshape research cultures over time. Fields that were once broad and intellectually adventurous become narrower. Questions that cannot be answered in a standard empirical format quietly disappear from the agenda.

There is also a quality problem. The pressure to publish in high-impact indexed journals has contributed to a well-documented proliferation of marginal, incremental work. A paper that confirms a minor variation of an established finding in a Scopus-indexed journal counts. A book that reframes an entire field's understanding of a problem, published by a university press, often counts for very little.

The Non-Traditional Research Output Gap

Several national research assessment frameworks have already recognised this problem and begun to address it. The UK's Research Excellence Framework explicitly evaluates Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs), including creative works, performances, and practice-led research. Australia's Excellence in Research for Australia system assigns codes to creative outputs, requiring researchers to submit a Research Statement that contextualises the scholarly contribution. In the United States, many tenure committees at research-intensive universities routinely evaluate books, translations, and critical editions as primary outputs, assessed by peer experts in the relevant field rather than by citation counts.

These frameworks share a common insight: the form of a research output does not determine its intellectual value. What matters is the rigour of the inquiry, the originality of the contribution, and the significance of the work within its disciplinary context.

The gap between these national frameworks and institutional practice at most universities globally remains wide. Rankings still drive behaviour, and rankings still favour bibliometric data. Until institutions align their internal reward structures with a more pluralistic understanding of research, individual researchers will continue to face a stark choice between doing meaningful work and doing promotable work. 

The Integrity Dimension

This is, at its core, a research integrity issue — though it is rarely framed that way.

Research integrity is usually discussed in terms of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. These are real problems, and they deserve serious attention. But there is a broader sense in which integrity means alignment between what an institution claims to value and what it actually rewards. When universities describe themselves as centres of knowledge creation while simultaneously reducing knowledge to what appears in Scopus, that is a form of institutional dishonesty.

It also creates downstream integrity problems. The pressure to publish in high-impact journals has been linked to questionable research practices: salami slicing, guest authorship, citation manipulation, and the strategic framing of null results. These are not random individual failures. They are predictable responses to a metrics environment in which the appearance of productivity is rewarded over the substance of contribution. 

A More Honest Accounting

The solution is not to abandon measurement. Research accountability matters. Public and institutional investment in research deserves transparent assessment. The question is whether the tools used for measurement are adequate to the thing being measured.

A more honest accounting of scholarly contribution would do several things. It would treat different output types as legitimate on their own terms, assessed by criteria appropriate to each form. It would separate research quality evaluation from ranking exercises built on bibliometric proxies. It would require institutions to articulate, explicitly, what kinds of knowledge they value — and then build reward structures that reflect that articulation.

It would also require the academic community to take seriously the difference between measuring research and reducing it. Citation counts capture something real: the extent to which a piece of work circulates within a defined literature. They do not capture originality, public impact, disciplinary transformation, or the slower, deeper forms of influence that often matter most.

A poem read by a hundred thousand people and a paper cited by twelve specialists are not the same kind of contribution. Neither is superior in the abstract. But a system that counts only the second and ignores the first is not measuring knowledge. It is measuring indexability. 

The Credibility Cost

There is a final irony worth noting. The global push for metrics-based research assessment was, in part, motivated by a desire to increase objectivity and reduce the influence of personal networks and institutional prestige on academic evaluation. The goal was credibility.

The result has been a different kind of credibility problem. A system that systematically undervalues entire traditions of scholarly work, that rewards form over substance, and that creates incentives for gaming rather than genuine contribution, is not objective. It is simply biased in a different direction — toward the measurable, the indexed, and the easily counted.

Rebuilding trust in research evaluation will require more than adding new database categories. It will require institutions to reassert their own judgment, to define what they value in specific and disciplinary terms, and to build assessment processes that can distinguish genuine contribution from the efficient accumulation of metrics.

That is harder than checking a database. It is also the only way to ensure that what universities reward bears some relationship to what scholarship is actually for.

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Zero Citation welcomes commentary on academic publishing, research integrity, and the systems that shape scholarly work. 

Editors publishing at home: Fair play or foul game?

 

In academic publishing, editors and associate editors sit in positions of considerable influence. They shape what gets published, set standards for rigour, and often define the intellectual direction of a journal. A recurring question, however, is whether those same individuals should publish their own research in the journals they oversee. The issue is not straightforward. It sits at the intersection of ethics, practicality, and the realities of academic careers.

At first glance, the concern seems obvious. If editors control the review process, allowing them to publish in their own journals could create a conflict of interest. Even if no wrongdoing occurs, the perception of bias can be damaging. Academic publishing relies heavily on trust. Authors trust that their work will be evaluated fairly, reviewers trust that their input matters, and readers trust that published articles meet the journal’s standards. Any suspicion that editors are favouring their own work risks undermining that trust.

That said, a blanket prohibition is neither practical nor necessarily desirable. Editors are typically leading scholars in their fields. Their research is often highly relevant to the scope of the journals they manage. Preventing them from publishing in those outlets could limit the quality and relevance of contributions. It may also create unintended consequences, such as pushing strong work to competing journals simply to avoid ethical scrutiny.

The key issue, then, is not whether editors should publish in their own journals, but under what conditions it is acceptable.

One argument in favor of allowing such publications is based on expertise and fit. Editors are often selected because they are active contributors to their field. Their work is likely to align closely with the journal’s aims. Excluding them could mean excluding some of the most influential research. In fast-moving areas, this could slow intellectual progress or fragment conversations across journals.

There is also a practical career consideration. Academic promotion and recognition often depend on publishing in top-tier journals. If an editor happens to lead one of those journals, a strict prohibition could place them at a disadvantage compared to peers. It would be unreasonable to expect editors to avoid publishing in a major outlet simply because they serve it, especially when editorial roles are often temporary.

However, these arguments only hold if robust safeguards are in place. Without them, the risks are significant. The most obvious concern is bias in the review process. Editors may consciously or unconsciously influence reviewer selection, interpretation of feedback, or final decisions. Even if the process is handled fairly, the lack of transparency can lead others to assume favoritism.

To address this, many journals adopt clear policies. A common approach is to require that any submission from an editor be handled independently by another editor, often a senior or external one. The submitting editor is completely excluded from the decision process. In some cases, journals appoint a guest editor specifically for such submissions. This helps ensure that the manuscript is treated like any other.

Double-blind peer review can also reduce bias, although it is not a complete solution. In many fields, it is relatively easy to infer authorship based on writing style, topic, or citations. Still, it adds a layer of protection and signals a commitment to fairness.

Transparency is equally important. Journals should clearly disclose when an article is authored by an editor and explain how the review process was managed. This does not eliminate all concerns, but it allows readers and authors to assess the integrity of the process. Silence, by contrast, invites suspicion.

Another useful safeguard is limiting frequency. Occasional publications by editors may be reasonable, but frequent appearances in their own journals raise questions. A pattern of repeated publication can suggest preferential treatment, even if none exists. Setting informal or formal limits can help maintain balance.

There is also a cultural dimension to consider. In some disciplines, editor-authored publications in their own journals are relatively common and accepted, provided procedures are followed. In others, the practice is viewed more critically. Norms vary, but expectations around fairness and transparency are becoming more consistent across fields.

Critics argue that even with safeguards, the practice should be avoided altogether. Their position is that the appearance of conflict is enough to justify a strict separation. In their view, editors should lead by example and submit their work elsewhere. This approach prioritises credibility above all else.

While this perspective has merit, it may be overly rigid. Academic publishing is already constrained by limited journal space, long review times, and competitive pressures. Imposing additional restrictions on editors could discourage qualified scholars from taking on editorial roles. That, in turn, could weaken journals rather than strengthen them.

A more balanced view recognizes that ethical publishing is not about eliminating all potential conflicts, but about managing them responsibly. Editors routinely handle conflicts in other contexts, such as reviewing work by colleagues or collaborators. Clear guidelines and accountability mechanisms are what make these processes credible.

Technology and open science practices may also help. For example, open peer review, where reviews and editorial decisions are made visible, can increase accountability. Pre-registration and data transparency can further reduce concerns about bias. While these practices are not yet universal, they point toward a future where trust is built through openness rather than strict exclusion.

Ultimately, the question comes down to principles. Academic publishing should be guided by fairness, transparency, and merit. If an editor’s paper meets the journal’s standards and is reviewed independently, there is no inherent reason it should be excluded. However, the burden of proof is higher. Editors must demonstrate, not just assume, that the process is fair.

For journals, this means formalizing policies and communicating them clearly. For editors, it means exercising restraint and being mindful of perceptions. For the broader academic community, it means evaluating evidence rather than relying on assumptions.

In conclusion, editors and associate editors can publish in their own journals, but only under strict and transparent conditions. The goal is not to prevent participation, but to protect the integrity of the publication process. When managed well, the practice can coexist with high ethical standards. When managed poorly, it risks eroding the very trust that academic publishing depends on.

The challenge is not choosing between inclusion and exclusion, but ensuring that credibility is never compromised.

Editors beaware: Watchdogs are keeping eyes

A recent controversy surrounding the International Journal of Tourism Research has reignited a long-standing concern in academic publishing: what happens when editors appear to benefit disproportionately from the journals they oversee?

According to reporting by Retraction Watch, more than half of the papers published in IJTR since 2024 cite the work of its current editor-in-chief, Timothy J. Lee. In 2024 alone, nearly three-quarters of the journal’s articles referenced his research, often multiple times. Even when excluding self-citations, 55% of published papers still cited him.

There is, at present, no public evidence that authors were directly pressured to cite the editor. But that is not the only issue. The deeper problem is structural. When an editor’s work is cited at such extraordinary rates in the very journal they control, the integrity of the editorial process inevitably comes into question.

Why this matters

Editors hold enormous power. They decide which manuscripts are sent to review, which reviewers are chosen, how revisions are evaluated, and ultimately what gets published. That authority exists to protect quality and fairness. It is not meant to advance personal citation metrics.

Even the perception that citing the editor improves acceptance odds can distort behavior. Authors may add unnecessary references “just in case.” Junior scholars, especially those from systems where journal metrics carry heavy weight, may believe citation is a strategic requirement. Over time, this creates a self-reinforcing loop: more citations inflate the editor’s profile, which strengthens their authority, which increases perceived pressure to cite.

That is not scholarship. That is metric engineering.

If editors wish to publish in their own journals, strict firewalls must be in place. If they are cited, those citations must be clearly justified and editorially independent. Otherwise, the journal risks becoming a vehicle for personal brand amplification rather than a platform for advancing knowledge.

The broader cultural problem

This case is not happening in isolation. The obsession with impact factors and citation counts has reshaped academic incentives. Editors are increasingly evaluated not just on quality control but on how high they can push journal metrics. Universities reward citation counts. Publishers reward growth. The system nudges behavior toward visibility, not necessarily rigor.

When editorial boards start functioning like metric acceleration units rather than community stewards, trust erodes.

Once trust erodes, everything erodes.

The uncomfortable reality

There are other editors in other disciplines whose citation patterns raise eyebrows. Not always as extreme. Not always as visible. But similar dynamics exist.

Some encourage extensive citation of “journal-relevant literature” that conveniently overlaps with their own portfolio. Some cultivate networks where mutual citation becomes normalized. Some build citation clusters centered around institutional colleagues.

And here is the key point: absence of proof is not proof of absence. Peer review is confidential. Decisions are opaque. Unless authors speak out, patterns remain hidden.

But patterns are now being tracked.

Independent analysts and watchdog groups are examining citation distributions more carefully than ever. Tools like Web of Science and citation mapping software make irregular concentration easier to detect. When over half of a journal’s articles cite the editor-in-chief, people notice. And when similar patterns emerge elsewhere, they will notice too.

Watchdogs are watching.

What should happen

Clear standards are needed:

• Editors should not benefit disproportionately from their own journals.

• Editorial decisions involving their work must be fully delegated and independently handled.

• Citation audits should be routine, not reactive.

• Publishers must intervene early when abnormal patterns emerge.

Most importantly, editors must remember their role. They are custodians of a scholarly community, not architects of their own citation empire.

Academic publishing runs on trust. Once that trust becomes negotiable, the credibility of the entire system is at stake.

Editors should be raising standards. Not their own h-index.

What really happened to Journal of Cleaner Production?

The recent downgrading of Journal of Cleaner Production in the ABDC ranking, from A to C, has triggered a familiar explanation: too many papers. The raw numbers certainly make that reaction understandable. 

Annual output rose from a few hundred papers a decade ago to well over four thousand in recent years. For many observers, volume became the story.

But volume alone is a blunt diagnosis. Plenty of journals have grown without collapsing in reputation. The more interesting question is why scale stopped working as a virtue and started functioning as a negative signal. 

Over the past years there has been a series of conversations in cyberspace ranging from Journal of Cleaner Production tolerating plagiarism to retraction controversies. 

Acacemic scholars concur that the degradation is a correct decision.

But what caused this fall from Journal of Cleaner Production to Journal of Mass Production?

1. Dilution of editorial coherence

In its earlier years, Journal of Cleaner Production had a relatively clear intellectual identity. It sat at the intersection of production systems, environmental impact, and operational improvement. Readers knew roughly what kind of paper belonged there and, just as importantly, what did not.

As the journal expanded, that boundary loosened. Today, the journal hosts work spanning engineering, policy, behavioural science, supply chains, consumer research, ESG reporting, psychology, agriculture, and governance. Individually, many of these papers are defensible. Collectively, they create a problem: the journal no longer communicates a clear centre of gravity.

Ranking bodies and senior scholars tend to penalise journals that feel like repositories rather than curators. When readers cannot easily articulate what a journal is “about”, they struggle to associate it with intellectual leadership. Over time, breadth starts to look like drift, not inclusivity.

The trajectory also points to a failure of editorial leadership, not in intent but in stewardship. Editors are custodians of a journal’s identity, selectivity, and long-term reputation. Allowing output to expand to several thousand papers a year without visibly tightening scope, rejection thresholds, or review governance signalled a loss of strategic control. Rather than actively shaping the field, editorial leadership appeared reactive to submission volume and publisher incentives. In ranking-driven environments, this is read as weakened gatekeeping. When editors stop drawing hard lines, the journal’s brand erodes, and responsibility for that erosion ultimately sits at the top.

2. Uneven review standards at scale

Running a journal that publishes several thousand papers a year is not just a logistical challenge; it is a governance challenge. Editorial decisions are necessarily decentralised across hundreds of associate editors and thousands of reviewers. Even with strong guidelines, consistency becomes fragile.

Small variations matter. One editor may desk-reject aggressively. Another may be more developmental. One reviewer panel may insist on deep theory and robustness. Another may focus mainly on novelty or context. None of this is malicious. But at scale, these variations accumulate into a reputation for unevenness.

Once authors begin to believe that acceptance depends heavily on who handles the paper, perceptions of lowered standards emerge, regardless of actual average quality. Rankings tend to respond to these perceptions rather than auditing individual review files.

The graph shows a striking and sustained rise in the number of papers published, moving from just 231 articles in 2011 to a peak of over 5,300 papers in 2021, before stabilising at a very high level above 4,400 papers per year. This growth did not happen gradually; it accelerated sharply after 2015, coinciding with the journal’s aggressive expansion in scope, special issues, and submission intake. While this scale-up increased visibility and throughput, it also introduced a classic quantity-over-quality problem. At such volumes, maintaining consistent editorial scrutiny, reviewer depth, and theoretical contribution becomes extremely difficult. The signal of selectivity weakens, average contribution becomes more uneven, and the journal begins to resemble a high-capacity outlet rather than a curated intellectual venue. In reputation-based systems like journal rankings, this kind of mass production is not interpreted as productivity, but as dilution, where growth itself becomes a negative quality signal rather than a strength.

3. Citation quality versus citation quantity

High publication volume often brings high total citations. On the surface, this looks positive. But modern journal evaluation looks beyond raw counts.

A large share of papers receiving very low citations, or citations concentrated within a narrow sustainability citation loop, weakens perceived influence. In other words, who cites the journal, and why, starts to matter more than how often it is cited.

When influence is diffuse rather than sharp, a journal can look busy without looking central. This is particularly damaging in ranking systems that rely on peer perception surveys, where senior academics draw on mental shortcuts rather than metric tables.

4. Special issues as a reputational risk multiplier

Special issues were a major growth engine for the journal. They attracted submissions, expanded networks, and allowed topical agility. But they also introduced structural risk.

Guest editors vary widely in experience, selectivity, and ambition. Some special issues are tightly curated and genuinely field-shaping. Others become loose collections of loosely connected papers responding to a fashionable keyword.

Readers rarely differentiate between “regular” and “special issue” quality when forming impressions. A few weak or repetitive special issues can disproportionately damage a journal’s reputation, because they are encountered as blocks rather than isolated papers. At scale, this effect compounds quickly.

5. Field-level saturation and fatigue

Sustainability research has grown explosively. With that growth has come repetition: similar models, recycled constructs, minor contextual tweaks, and limited theoretical advancement. This is not unique to one journal, but journals that publish at scale absorb more of this saturation.

When a journal becomes the primary outlet for incremental sustainability work, it inherits the field’s fatigue. Reviewers and readers start to associate the title with “more of the same”, even when genuinely strong papers are present.

In mature fields, journals are judged less on volume and more on their ability to filter, prioritise, and say no. Failure to do so signals declining gatekeeping power, which ranking bodies tend to interpret as declining quality.

Pulling it together

None of these factors alone explains the downgrade. Together, they form a coherent story. This is not a moral failure or a sudden collapse. It is a structural outcome of rapid growth in a reputation-based system.

For Elsevier, the challenge is not to defend past growth, but to demonstrate renewed editorial control. For authors, the lesson is that journal labels lag reality. And for other journals watching closely, the message is clear: expansion without curation is not neutral. It is a strategic choice with long-term reputational costs.

Are fake citations really an AI problem?

 

The recent case reported by Retraction Watch involving fake references in the Journal of Academic Ethics is easy to frame as a generative AI problem. The corresponding author openly admitted that ChatGPT was used to generate the references, and nearly two-thirds of them turned out to be fabricated. That admission makes the story feel settled. AI hallucinated citations, the journal missed them, and the system failed. But that conclusion is too neat, and ultimately misleading.

What this case really shows is not that generative AI creates fake citations, but that authors chose not to verify them. Large language models do not submit manuscripts, format reference lists, or click “submit” on journal portals. Humans do. In this article, the research itself was described as real and based on real data. The failure occurred at the most basic scholarly task: checking whether cited work exists. That is not a new problem introduced by AI. It is an old one, now made more visible and easier to scale.

The details uncovered by Erja Moore make this clear. The references were not random strings. Many looked plausible. Some cited real authors writing on similar topics, but paired them with nonexistent article titles. Others listed real journals but incorrect volumes, issues, or page numbers that pointed to entirely different papers. These are the kinds of errors that slip through when references are copied uncritically, padded to satisfy reviewers, or assembled to signal familiarity with a field rather than to support an argument. Long before generative AI, scholars were already citing papers they had not read.

The uncomfortable irony is that this happened in an ethics journal, and that many fabricated references pointed to another flagship ethics outlet, the Journal of Business Ethics. But the deeper issue is not hypocrisy. It is institutional complacency. Peer reviewers typically do not check references line by line. Editors rarely audit citation accuracy unless something triggers suspicion. Publishers rely on trust, not verification, because the system was built for a slower, smaller volume of submissions. Generative AI did not break that system. It exposed how fragile it already was.

So no, generative AI is not solely responsible for fake citations. It is an accelerant, not the fire. The responsibility still lies with authors to verify sources, with editors to enforce basic standards, and with publishers to adapt integrity checks to a world where plausible text can be generated instantly. Blaming AI alone is convenient, but it lets the academic community avoid a harder conversation: that citation misconduct has always existed, and we simply no longer have the excuse of not seeing it.