[4] Use of the impact factor is not necessarily undesirable as it can reasonably incentivise editors to improve their journal through the publication of good science.
As early as 1999, in a landmark essay Scientific Communication – A Vanity Fair?, Georg Franck criticized citation counts as creating a marketplace where "success in science is rewarded with attention".
In particular, he warned of a future "shadow market" where journal editors might inflate citation counts by requiring spurious references.
[4] When an author submits a manuscript for publication in a scientific journal, the editor may request that the article's citations be expanded before it will be published.
Coercive citation, on the other hand, is a specific unethical business practice in which the editor asks the author to add citations to papers published in the very same journal (self-citation) and in particular to cite papers that the author regards as duplicate or irrelevant.
The practice of coercive citation is risky, as it may damage the reputation of the journal, and it hence has the potential of actually reducing the impact factor.
[5] In 2012, Wilhite and Fong published results of a comprehensive survey of 6,700 scientists and academics in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines.
[2][9] However, Wilhite and Fong found that: somewhat surprisingly, the results … suggest that more highly ranked journals are more likely to coerce … Focusing on the top 30 journals in each field tempers the results in a minor fashion, but the rank effect is still present and strong.
Coercive citation is primarily targeted at younger researchers with less senior academic ranks and at papers with a smaller number of authors in order to have the greatest effect on the impact factor.