Coercive citation is when a reviewer presses you to add citations to their own work without a scholarly reason. Read each suggested reference: cite it if it genuinely supports your argument, decline politely and in writing if it does not, and tell the handling editor which references you added, which you declined, and why.
Coercive citation is a request made for a reason other than the manuscript
Coercive citation is a request from a reviewer or an editor to add references for a reason other than the scholarly needs of the paper — for example, to raise the citation count of the reviewer's own work, or of the journal. The term describes the request, not the reference. A reviewer's own paper can be exactly the right thing to cite, because reviewers are chosen for expertise in your topic.
A suggestion made in good faith is recognisable by three features:
- It carries a reason. The report says what the reference establishes, contradicts or extends, so you can act on it without guessing.
- It attaches to a place in your text. The reviewer points at a sentence, a paragraph or a gap in the methods, not at the reference list as a whole.
- It is indifferent to compliance. Nothing in the report ties the recommendation, or the next round, to whether the references appear.
COPE guidance for peer reviewers asks reviewers not to suggest citations to their own work merely to increase citations or visibility, and to base any suggestion on scholarly grounds. The ICMJE Recommendations treat review as a privileged, confidential task and ask reviewers to declare their conflicts of interest. Both are public, so you can point an editor at a published standard rather than at a person.
Under double-blind review you cannot confirm whose papers were suggested
Peer review at Directive Publications is double-blind, so reviewer identity is not disclosed to authors. That changes how you write about a citation request. You can observe a pattern — a block of suggested references, no reasons given, most of them sharing one author group — but you cannot establish that the reviewer is one of those authors. Describe what you observed. Do not name the person you suspect, and do not write "the reviewer is citing himself" in a document that goes to the editor.
The pattern cuts both ways. A specialist in a narrow field may legitimately have written several of the papers that matter, so a cluster by one author group is a reason to look hard at the reasons given, not proof on its own.
A three-case decision table for a reviewer citation request
Sort every suggested reference into one of three cases. The wording is written to be pasted into a response letter and edited.
| Case | How you recognise it | What you write to the reviewer | What you write to the editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Genuinely relevant | The reference bears on your question, method, population or a claim you make, and you can draft one sentence that uses it honestly. | "We thank the reviewer for directing us to [Ref]. We have cited it in the Discussion (page 9, line 14) to support the statement that [claim], and have revised that sentence accordingly." | Nothing separate. Note in the response letter that the added references were assessed on merit, as you would for any suggestion. |
| Marginally relevant | The reference sits in the field but does not touch your argument. No reason is given. You cannot write a sentence that uses it without stretching what it says. | "We have read [Ref] carefully. It addresses [topic] in [setting], which falls outside the scope of our analysis because [reason], and we have therefore not cited it. We have added [alternative] at page 6, line 3, which speaks to the reviewer's point." | One line in your covering note: "Reviewer 2 suggested six references without stated reasons. We cited two, and explained for each of the remaining four why it falls outside our scope." |
| Plainly coercive | A block of references with no reasons, clustering on one author group; or wording that ties acceptance or the next round to adding them; or a request to strengthen the reference list that points at no part of your text. | "We have considered each of the suggested references individually. We have cited those that support specific statements in the manuscript, listed above. For the remainder we could not identify a point at which they support our argument, and we have not added them." | A separate, plainly worded message. Quote the request verbatim, state what you cited and why, and ask the editor to consider whether the suggestions meet the expectations set for reviewers. Make no allegation about any individual. |
Five questions that sort a fair suggestion from citation pressure
- Can you write the sentence? Draft one sentence in which the reference supports a specific claim of yours. If you cannot, the reference does not belong in the paper, whoever suggested it.
- Did the report give a reason? A reason you can evaluate is the strongest signal that the suggestion is about your manuscript rather than about someone's citation count.
- Do the references cluster? Check the author lists. A block sharing one author group is worth recording even though it proves nothing by itself.
- Is the request tied to the decision? Wording that makes the additions a condition of acceptance, rather than a suggestion for improvement, changes the case however relevant the papers are.
- Would you have found it yourself? Run the search you would have run at the writing stage. If the reference should already have been in your list, the reviewer has done your paper a favour.
How to raise a coercive citation request with the handling editor
Raise the request in a separate message or covering note, not buried at point 14 of a point-by-point response. The handling editor reads the review and your response together and takes the decision, so an objection you never put in writing is one the editor has no reason to weigh.
Subject: Manuscript [ID] — reference suggestions in Reviewer 2's report
Dear Editor,
Reviewer 2 asks us to add [n] references at point [x]. No reason is given for any of them, and [n] of them share the same author group. The request reads: "[quote the wording exactly]".
We have cited [two] of these references, at [locations], because they support [claims]. For the others we could not identify a place in the manuscript where they support our argument, and we have given our reasoning for each in the response letter.
We are not making an allegation about any individual, and we recognise that reviewers are chosen for expertise, so their own work may well be relevant. We would be grateful if you would consider whether these suggestions meet the expectations set for reviewers in COPE's guidance, and we will revisit any of them if the specific claim each one supports can be identified for us.
Yours sincerely,
[Name], corresponding author
That last sentence does the work. Asking which claim each reference supports takes a good-faith reviewer one line to answer, and moves the exchange back to the manuscript.
What Directive Publications publishes on coercive citation, and what it does not
We do not publish a page devoted to citation manipulation, and there is no point pretending otherwise in an article about it. What is published, and what you can hold us to, is this:
- Review is double-blind.
- At least two independent expert reviewers are sought for a research manuscript.
- The handling editor takes the decision rather than the reviewers.
- Our editorial policies align with COPE Core Practices.
- An appeal goes to the Editor-in-Chief, whose decision is final.
Our reviewer guidelines set out what we ask of reviewers.
Telling the editor puts the request in front of the person who decides. It does not oblige us to identify a reviewer to you, and it is not a promise about the outcome of your paper — no journal can honestly offer one.
A citation added under pressure becomes part of the permanent record
Reference lists are not private correspondence. Every article we publish is deposited to Crossref under our DOI prefix and released as JATS XML, and your reference list is published with the article, open access under CC BY 4.0, as part of the permanent version of record. A citation added to satisfy a reviewer sits in that record permanently, attached to your name, pointing at a claim it does not support. Citation counts also feed the metrics used to rank journals and researchers, so references added under pressure distort those numbers for everyone who later relies on them.
Before you send the revision, read our peer review process and publication ethics pages. For the surrounding work, see How to Respond to Reviewer Comments for the structure of a response letter, Impact Factor, CiteScore and h-index: What They Really Mean for what citation counts are used for, and How to Handle a Rejection if the decision goes against you.