Incentives for Journal Editors

Abstract

Scholars may become journal editors because editors may generate more citations of their own works. This paper empirically establishes that a scholar's publications are more likely to be cited by papers in a journal that is edited by the scholar. We then test if editors exercise influence on authors to cite editors' papers by either pressuring authors ("editor-pressure" hypothesis) or accepting articles with references to the editors' papers ("editor-selection" hypothesis), by using the keyword analysis and the forward citation analysis, respectively. We find no evidence for the two hypotheses, which leaves self-selection as a possible cause for the editor effect.