With the use of metrics of all kinds on the rise - in applications for grants, promotion, and tenure - the notion that impact factors can be gamed is worrying, if hardly surprising.

A new article in Science, Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing, looks at how the manipulation works and how widespread it might be.

The authors state:

The figures confirm what researchers already know: it's good to appear in Nature. Articles published in Nature received more than 500,000 citations in 2010, making it the most highly cited journal in Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Report.