How about if you've been Editor-in-Chief of the journal for the past 15 years?
Hagop Akiskal, M.D is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of International Mood Center San Diego Veterans Administration Medical Center. Since 1996, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Affective Disorders. He is indeed a coauthor on 165 papers appearing in that journal (see image below). Out of 403 papers that come up in a PubMed search for 'Akiskal H', 162 of them are in JAD. Should this be considered self-publishing? Highly unethical? Or par for the course?To be fair:
- There is another Editor-in-Chief (C. Katona).
- Excluding papers published before 1996 yields 155 articles in the ScienceDirect search of JAD.
- Excluding the word "editorial" drops the count further to only 142 papers. [This removes titles such as Special issue on circular insanity and beyond: historic contributions of French psychiatry to contemporary concepts and research on bipolar disorder and Good news to share: backlog no more.]
click on image for a larger view
Viewing all 165 titles from the original ScienceDirect search, we can see two major themes emerge: bipolar (157 articles) and temperament (133 articles). As I mentioned in my previous post on Abusing Chocolate and Bipolar Diagnoses, the senior author of the 'Are "social drugs" (tobacco, coffee and chocolate) related to the bipolar spectrum?' paper (i.e., Hagop Asiskal) has a goal of expanding the diagnosis of bipolar disorder into the "bipolar spectrum".
More on this in a future post.
Perhaps I'll invite him to co-author one of my papers.
ReplyDeleteHmm, well spotted.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there are 39 hits in that journal for a certain Kareen K Akiskal. All of which Hagop was also an author on.
This sounds corrupt and I like to hear what the editor has to say.
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful example of how corrupt psychiatry has become.
ReplyDeleteIs it corrupt or is it just grandiose and entitled? It's the latter in my view.
ReplyDeleteWow. This shows how naiive I am - I thought there would be rules against editors getting published in their own magazines.
ReplyDeleteThe behavior analyst Johnny Matson founded and edits two journals.
ReplyDeleteIn one, founded in 1987, he is author or co-author of 108 papers so far. Two are editorials (one of which is a retraction) and 13 are book reviews.
In the other, founded in 2007, he is author or co-author of 54 papers so far. None is either an editorial or a book review.
I have the same questions as in the original post and similar questions about self-citation. How much is too much?
This reminds me of when Nemeroff was editor of his own journal and penned (and published) a congratulatory note to himself in the very same Journal! Maybe Anon is right-- this is rank narcissism at work (which often does lead to corruption) as another Anon noted.
ReplyDeleteOn the opposite end of the spectrum, when I was a grad student, my advisor was section editor at our top journal. Even though the journal allowed editors to submit papers, which were handled by an associate editor, my advisor refused to do so. His feeling was that asking an AE, who served as his invitation, to review his work was not kosher. It annoyed me at the time, but I do think he was right.
ReplyDeleteAnd don't get me started about the corruption at PNAS, where members of the academy can publish without blind peer-review.
ReplyDeleteOh, come on people, enough with the cynicism and paranoia.
ReplyDeleteI am sure this guy would reject his own papers, if he thought they were crap! :)
Well, Anonymous #4 nudged me to check out Nemeroff's performance as editor of Neuropsychopharmacology. Here are the numbers.
ReplyDeleteIn the years that he was editor (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006),he had 104 publications, of which 17 were in his own journal. In the proximate years that he was not editor (2002, 2007, 2008) he had 52 publications, of which 2 were in NPP (Fisher Exact p 2-tailed = 0.035).
Is there a pattern here? LOL.
As usual, you nailed it Dr. Carroll!
ReplyDeletedon't get me started about the corruption at PNAS, where members of the academy can publish without blind peer-review.
ReplyDelete