Surprise: Journal editors ask scholars to cite relevant articles from their journals in their research

This is a surprise? The fact that it is primarily younger authors who get the most suggestions slightly helps to differentiate it from the fact that editors might simply know the articles in their own journal best. The alternative might be the editors want to suggest articles that they know to everyone, but that they refrain from doing so to senior researchers who might react negatively. From USA Today:

Business, economics and related scholarly journal editors are coercing scholars into unnecessarily citing their own journals, a survey suggests, perverting the research record.

A system of "impact factors", tied to references listed in studies, pervades the scholarly enterprise, notes survey author Allen Wilhite and Eric Fong of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who reports the survey of 6,672 researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and business research in the current Science journal. The survey covered journal editor behavior from 832 publications.

Overall, about 20% of survey respondents say that a journal editor had coerced extra citations to their own journal from them. Broadly, journals with higher impact factors attract more prestige, advertising and power in hiring and firing decisions in scholarly circles, the authors note, giving journal editors an incentive to extort added citations to their publications in the studies they consider for publication. "(T)he message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection," write the authors.

In particular, younger professors with few co-authors who need publications to keep their jobs reported the most pressure. Business journal editors coerced the most often, followed by economics, and then psychology and other social sciences. . . .