As someone who reviews papers (mostly for IEEE or ACM conferences and journals), I’d say that this is a failure on the part of the reviewers. Reviewers are expected to check the references; if they aren’t doing this, it’s appropriate to complain to the journal editors.
Of course, but sometimes that’s just not possible, or are reviewers expected to have subscriptions to all journals?
Also, I remember from previous reviews I did that I was sometimes asked to let papers through that I would have normally rejected because the author had a reputation and thus couldn’t be rejected. Pshaw!
Perhaps a controlled vocabulary, similar to the efforts of the rel attribute for weblinks would help. Ask the authors to explain why they are including a reference. Note that there are a some of these already: eg. cf. contra. :) Easier ways to reference internal parts of papers would help too (page numbers are just not accurate enough).
Being asked to ‘let through’ an article because of a reputation is outrageous. I’ve never encountered such a thing (not to say that it’s impossible, but it is such a blatant ethical violation …).—JamesHowison
Agreed. It’s part of the reason why I left the field and pursued my current endeavour.
Oh yeah, I got the very same impression that you are talking about while i was at university. You might want to have a look at the following paper that i stumbled upon recently
Blind men and elephants: What do citation summaries tell us about a research article? http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/116332025/abstract
“Our study shows that citation summaries overlap to some extent with the abstracts of the (cited) papers and that they also differ from them in that they focus on different aspects of these papers than do the abstracts.”
I don’t have university network access any more, so i can’t have a look at that paper, but it seems to take a closer look at this bizarre situation.
Cheers
Sebastian Kayser
