A History of Applied Linguistics - From 1980 to the present

9.8 Cronyism, ignorism, Matthew effects and other dubious
practices

I cite you and you cite me and we both cite our friend Harry. This behavior
is not uncommon in any branch of science, as noted by Cole and Cole
(1973) who coined the term“cronyism”. Though in principle this is unethi-
cal if the reference would not have been included otherwise, it is typical of
situations where there are competing groups in an area. High citation scores
are always desirable to strengthen the common cause.
The opposite of cronyism could be called“ignorism”; not mentioning a pub-
lication because it is written by an“enemy”, someone from a competing group,
even though the publication would be relevant for the research reported on.
Less problematic, but distorting the idea of equal treatment, is a form of
the Matthew effect: publications that already have a high citation score tend
to attract more citations than publications that have a lower citation score.
Yet another strategy is to self-cite abundantly. It is not a very elegant
strategy and researchers who overdo this lower their status among their
peers. In particular university managers are very concerned about self-
citations, since they may lead to higher impact factors than citations should
indicate. But according to Harzing (2011: 183),“excluding self-citations is
almost always a waste of time”. Paul Meara suggests another strategy to lift
citations: someone could review lots of manuscripts for journals, and insist
that the papers he recommends should cite his own work. Related to this is

Figure 9.4Scattergram of leadership listings and total of citations

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