Like all my fellow, quiet, law-abiding academics, I am being bombarded with fawning messages flattering my obscure works, sent by alleged representatives of bizarre book clubs and non-existent conferences inviting our cooperation. They feature AI-generated prose plucked from reviews or the publishers’ descriptions of our books. After an initial wary response (don’t respond!), we learn only a “small fee” will be needed.
Time-wasting, insulting balderdash.
But the craven behavior is now creeping into the purportedly dignified, peer-review realm, as this recent example will show.
“Your review has made a big impact!” Proclaimed the email from a big academic publisher of a respectable journal that is indexed in all the proper sources.
It continued: “We recently informed the authors of [“title”] that their work is one of our top 10 most-cited papers published in 2024….As peer reviewer for this manuscript you share in that success.” Offering thanks and praise for the “efforts and integrity” of reviewers like me, it encouraged me to submit any “research of [my] own” that I might have “to share.”
I went back to check. I had indeed reviewed that essay pre-publication in 2024; it appeared in early 2025, the author having made the recommended changes. While it is nice to be thanked for unpaid contributions, that work is part of any decent scholar’s responsibilities. I am content with the automatically generated message of gratitude that arrives following submission of a review.
Suspicious about how many citations it took to make it into the “top ten,” I looked up the article in Web of Science powered by Clarivate (which the email named as its source). The answer? 5 citations.
That is not very many – though it is not negligible for a historical article in its first year. Unfortunately, 4 of the 5 citing articles appeared in the same journal.
Then I wondered where the article stood within the famous “top ten.” Perhaps with only 5 citations, it was in 10th place—dead last. So, still in Web of Science, I called up all 113 articles published by that journal in that year, sorting them by number of citations and aware that ties were possible.
One article had 19 citations…. others had—6, 7, or 8. The article with 5 citations, was in 6th place tied with 25 other articles. Indeed, to be ranked in the top ten, an article needed only 1 citation! That status covered 93 of the 113 articles. In other words, 82.3% of all the articles the journal published that year were in the “top ten.”
Most authors and most peer reviewers of articles published in that journal would have received the cloying message that sought to artificially inflate both the journal’s reputation and its submission coffers.
So — why this over-the-top, smarmy flattery and the misplaced competitiveness? What has happened? Why do respectable journals that proudly claim to reject half or more of their submissions need to be soliciting input through artificial flattery? Scholarship already suffers enough from various forms of nefarious competition without adding to the burden. We are neither so needy nor so stupid.