Wilhite & Fong (2012) documented coercive self-citation — editors pressuring authors to add citations to the editor's own journal — as a common, measurable practice

In a 2012 Science report (335:542–543), Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong analyzed 6,672 survey responses from researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and business, along with data from 832 journals, and found that journal editors routinely pressure authors to add citations to the editor's own journal — not to remedy a genuine gap in attribution, but to inflate the journal's Journal Impact Factor. Their operational definition: coercive self-citation is a request that "(i) give[s] no indication that the manuscript was lacking in attribution; (ii) make[s] no suggestion as to specific articles, authors, or a body of work requiring review; and (iii) only guide[s] authors to add citations from the editor's journal." The study identified 175 journals as coercers, one of them named by 49 different respondents. A verbatim editor request captured in the literature: authors were told they cite a journal "once in 42 references" and "consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in [that journal] to your present article."

The finding is a textbook case of Goodhart's Law — when a descriptive measure (citation counts, built on infrastructure descended from Garfield's Science Citation Index) becomes an evaluative target, it invites gaming. The impact factor was designed to describe a journal's average influence; once it governed prestige and tenure, editors acquired a lever to manufacture the number directly. This is a distinct failure mode from the citation-integrity problems tracked at claim-wikipedia-amari-sgd-citogenesis (where copied errors masquerade as independent corroboration): there the counting is honest but the sources are not independent; here the counting itself is coerced.