When I went to the conference last week I attended a presentation by the editors of several journals. They spoke about what worked and didn’t in getting work into their journals and there was a lot of good stuff to learn there. What surprised me was to hear them say something to the effect of “We look at your bibliography and if you haven’t cited any papers in our journal than your paper is likely a poor fit and likely to be rejected without being reviewed. ”
I’ve heard of this before, but presented in a different way. Once before (What you measure moves) we talked about journals deliberate trying to boost their impact factors by forcing papers published in those journals to increase the number of times they cite other papers in that journal. This can be understood as a dressed up version of this impact factor gaming. Editors say something vaguely plausible about the purpose of that auto-citation, but ultimately the purpose could be to game the impact ratings.
On the other hand, is it so unreasonable that busy editors at least in part judge suitability by if the body of work that the paper joins has been published in that journal in the past? If you’ve got 20-40 or so papers you are citing and what are the odds that not one is from the journal you are submitting it to yet that is the right journal for it to be in? If the journal is really down market than that won’t have much content, but for a top field journal, you really should be citing the work in the field you are submitting or else have a good reason why they aren’t there.
