Inflation of impact factors by journal self-citation in cardiovascular science

Excerpt

Recently, several major cases of fraud in science were exposed in the Netherlands [1‐3]. Unfortunately, the case of Don Poldermans from Erasmus University outlined that this scientific misbehaviour has also affected cardiovascular science, [3] after previous shocking cases in medicine, [4] including the Woo-Suk Hwang debacle on cell stem technology published by Science [5] (see ref. [6] for an extensive analysis of the case). During the editorship of Michiel J. Janse (and my associate editorship) of Cardiovascular Research (1995–2002), there were no retractions, although some investigations were initiated. However, there were five retractions over the subsequent 10 years under the co-editorship of Michael H. Piper and David Garcia-Dorado [7]. …