the risk that papers that cite a reviewer’s work may have a higher chance to
be accepted. Afinal problematic tendency is“black boxing”: using a large
number of references to support a point. It shows how well read the author
is and how strong the support is for her ideas orfindings. Careful analysis
readily shows that many references are only marginally or not at all relevant
to the point made.
9.9 The risk of publication pressures
The publication pressure can lead to superficial reading and not checking
original publications: Simkin and Roychowdhury (2003) present disturbing
data on an estimation of the percentage of people that cite a paper and have
actually read it. On the basis of copied misprint information they estimate
that only about 20 percent of citers read the original.
Publication in a high-ranking journal is no guarantee that an article will
actually be cited. An analysis of 225 journals in immunology and surgery by
Wealeet al.(2004) shows that some 23 percent of the articles in these jour-
nals from a given month never get cited. They also show that there is a high
negative correlation between impact factors and number of non-cited articles.
To what extent this also applies for AL journals is not clear.
9.10 AL journals and their impact
The informants were asked about the journals they use regularly. The origi-
nal question was:“Which journals do you read?”, but obviously in practice
most researchers will not read journals cover to cover but do a search using
GS, WoS or Scopus, which is likely to include articles from those journals.
But the gist of the question remains the same and most informants listed the
following journals in alphabetical order:
Applied Linguistics
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
Language Learning
Modern Language Journal
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
TESOL Quarterly.
Other journals mentioned regularly are: Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
Applied Psycholinguistics
Cognition
International Journal of Applied Linguistics(InJAL)
International Journal of Bilingualism
International Review of Applied Linguistics(IRAL)
116 The citation game