A small clique of academics are accepting each other’s papers for publication in top business journals in violation of clear rules to mitigate conflicts of interest (COI), claims a study on how “reciprocal handling” of journal submissions has led to a handful of scholars gaining “disproportionate control” over publication and career opportunities.
Of the 1,585 articles published by two Financial Times (FT) 50 journals published between 2010 and 2024, nearly half (788) were written or co-written by just 54 prolific authors, although these scholars made up only 2.4 per cent of overall 2,207 contributors, explains a paper published in Journal of Business Ethics.
For these highly prolific authors, at least a quarter of their output involved links with an editor that might reasonably be viewed as a COI, such as “reciprocal acceptance”, it says. This is when two academics accept each other’s papers over time, a practice that might be seen as a “tacit exchange of editorial favour”.
This “elite cohort” of prolific authors was “remarkably homogeneous”, with 90 per cent holding PhDs from North American universities, while only 5 per cent were women, the study adds.
Auditing the entire 14-year dataset using a “conservative reasonable-observer standard”, the paper concludes 50 per cent of 946 author–editor ties had “at least one definitive COI, with a further 11.6 per cent possibly conflicted”.
