Cite me to approve your research!
News:
To achieve scientific integrity, researchers do not know the names of the reviewers used by the scientific journal to review research before approving it for publication, but the phenomenon of "forced citation" that has spread in the scientific research community has made it easy for researchers to know their names.
Reviewers seek to enhance their "Hirsch" index, which is a measure used to evaluate a researcher's productivity and the impact of their research by combining the number of published research papers and the number of citations those papers received, so they ask researchers to add their own research to the list of references, and obstructing publication is the expected penalty for those who refuse to respond.
It seems that many were subjected to such "hidden extortion" in academic publishing, as an analytical study that included more than 18,000 scientific articles published across 4 open research platforms revealed that research that quotes the work of reviewers is more likely to be accepted compared to those that do not.
Comment:
The news refers to a study conducted recently by Adrian Barnett of Queensland University of Technology in Australia and published as a research draft, that reviewers whose names appeared in the list of references were more likely to approve the publication of articles after the first review. In contrast, when the reviewer asks the authors to cite their own research, and this is not done, they are more likely to reject the research or approve it with reservations.
The author of the study spoke of complaints from authors who said that they are sometimes forced to add references at the request of reviewers only, adding that this behavior may turn the scientific arbitration process into a "utilitarian transaction", as the reviewers of these researches seek to enhance their Hirsch index by increasing citations, and this in turn brings them many benefits.
Ali Al-Baglouti, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sfax, Tunisia, and winner of the prestigious Pfizer Prize for Scientific Research, described this act with the phrase "Cite me to approve your research," saying that it is destructive to scientific research, and pointing out that there is rarely a researcher who has not been exposed to this trade-off, but the difference is in the way it is dealt with.
This research is further evidence of the deterioration of so-called scientific neutrality, the integrity of scientific research, and its keenness to reveal the facts as they are without bias or utilitarian and self-serving calculations, whether for some researchers, some reviewers, or the journals called "peer-reviewed journals," which are supposed to be role models in the alleged integrity!
The conclusion is that the aura that the West has built around the scientific method in research and what has been surrounded by means and methods to give more sanctity, but has become one of the givens, so the researcher or student of science cannot go beyond it, this aura is collapsing as the ideas and concepts of Western capitalism collapse.
And in this is a message to those who are still obsessed with what the West has, blindly imitating them, following in their footsteps with their eyes closed; that open your eyes - especially researchers and scientists - not everything you see is gold, and you, as Muslims, have gold and pure essence in the method of Islam, even in the method of research and seeking knowledge, and you have in the early Muslim scholars a good example.
Written for the Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir
Hossam El-Din Mostafa
