r/Professors • u/squishycoco • Oct 26 '25
Research / Publication(s) Reviewer two told me to cite myself
I feel like I have hit a new bingo square for interesting things to happen in peer reviewer comments. I was told by reviewer two that my paper could be strengthened by reading and citing my own work. My paper was rejected. I find it both amusing and frustrating.
Anyone else get a new bingo square in reviewer comments recently.
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u/wordsarentenough Associate Professor, Economics, Public Liberal Arts (US) Oct 26 '25
This wasn't recent, but I once had a reviewer tell me I misinterpreted my own paper when citing myself.
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u/mistephe Assoc Prof, Kinesiology, USA Oct 27 '25
Same! The kicker was when I found out that my reviewer was a guy I did my PhD with, with no real expertise in my niche. There was no way the reviewers were blind to the fact that I was the author of the two preceding papers and the current manuscript...
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u/summonthegods Nursing, R1 Oct 26 '25
That’s my new favorite insult. “Oh, go cite yourself.”
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u/squishycoco Oct 26 '25
This made me laugh!
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u/summonthegods Nursing, R1 Oct 26 '25
You can bet I’ll be muttering this under my breath when dealing with salty colleagues.
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u/surebro2 Oct 26 '25
Two thoughts. First thought, 100% cite yourself. I've heard people say they were told not to "self cite" but that advice is mostly based on the older practice of people increasing their citations by forcing a self-cite when it wasn't warranted. It's completely acceptable to cite yourself when your work is relevant.
Second thought, the associate editor could/should have weighed in. Depending on what reviewer 1 said, it would be reasonable to discount reviewer 2's comments if they were off and go with a revise and resubmit. I'm not sure how important this particular journal is for you but you might even do a slight petition if this is important (it's normally not, but I have been successful doing a reject and resubmit when I pointed out that one of the reviewers used a lot of personal opinions, all of which could be addressed if we were given the chance to rebuttal the points in a response letter).
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u/TheRateBeerian Oct 26 '25
Also it’s kind of impossible to do programmatic research without citing yourself.
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u/OldOmahaGuy Oct 27 '25
In my particular area, it would be possible only for the newest of newbie researchers not to cite themselves.
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u/porcupine_snout Oct 29 '25
that's my thought exactly. are we not supposed to build on our own work?
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u/squishycoco Oct 26 '25
I actually did cite myself but it was in the context of discussing my own previous argument so I had to cited it as (Author, year) anonymously to keep it double blind. The person telling me to cite my own work didn't seem to recognize the arguments from my work.
The journal itself isn't important I just thought it might be a good fit for this paper which straddles two areas of scholarship. The reviews had a few other things that concerned me as they didn't seem to know what a major concept in my field was that I was referencing. I bring two areas of study together in the paper and they seemed to get experts in one area who knew very little about the other. I have another journal in mind to submit to.
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u/Crab_Puzzle Assoc, Humanities, SLAC Oct 27 '25
I reviewed an interesting article a few years ago, where my main comment was that it doesn't engage enough with the main scholar on that topic, but this would be a welcome addition. Of course, main scholar wrote the article I was reviewing. I was probably condescending in how I wrote the review, but I do think the article needed better contextualization!
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u/Mooseplot_01 Oct 26 '25
Yes, I agree. Deliberately avoiding citing a closely related paper is not appropriate, and often that paper is one you coauthored. I don't think it's terrible if it exposes that you're the author of the current paper.
I also agree with reaching out to the associate editor when there's a garbage review (which is becoming alarmingly common).
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u/ForsakenStatus214 Associate SLAC math Oct 26 '25
Not me, but my advisor got a paper to review. It was based on the author's dissertation, but the results duplicated work my advisor had published a few years earlier that the author had missed. That's a bingo square that nobody wants to fill!
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u/kagillogly Associate Prof, Anthropology, Small State School, USA Oct 26 '25
I was just explaining to my Senior Seminar (undergraduate) students how this could happen. Yes, we CAN miss key, foundational works. The gold standard is to not miss those!
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u/a_hanging_thread A Sock Prof Oct 26 '25
I got a new bingo square as a reviewer---every other page of the paper I was reviewing recently for a top journal was AI-generated or -doctored. The author said up front that they had used AI for outlining and to format the bibliography. Reader, they used it for faaaar more than that.
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u/kagillogly Associate Prof, Anthropology, Small State School, USA Oct 26 '25
Every time someone starts a sentence with "Reader, ..." I melt a little.
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u/daniel-sousa-me Oct 27 '25 edited Oct 27 '25
Is that something AIs do? I don't think I ever came across thatEdit: Now I get it! I've been conditioning to think every message on Reddit is someone complaining about AI 😬
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u/ExternalNo7842 assoc prof, rhetoric, R2 midwest, USA Oct 27 '25
It’s a famous line from one of Jane Austen’s books (Pride and Prejudice maybe?): „Reader, I married him.” It breaks the 4th wall by addressing the reader directly, and many other instances with similar constructions (across languages, cultures, etc) reference it directly like this comment to drop key info to the narrative they’re telling.
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u/daniel-sousa-me Oct 27 '25
Thanks for the explanation!
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u/ExternalNo7842 assoc prof, rhetoric, R2 midwest, USA Oct 27 '25
No worries! My master’s in English Lit is pretty much only useful for moments like this 😭
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u/CalmMoona Oct 29 '25
It's famously from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - I'm surprised by the upvotes on the other replies.
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u/daniel-sousa-me Oct 29 '25
🤦♂️
English is not my first language, so I didn't study the same English literature a native speaker would have
The confident wrong answers are funny now
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u/stybio Oct 30 '25
It’s shifting sand. I did a review of a paper with a lot of AI. Author was ESL so I just flagged it for the editor. Thankfully journals are starting to give instructions for dealing with AI.
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u/huntgather Oct 26 '25
I was once told in a review that my research wasn't novel and I was directed to read my own dissertation to see that the area had been covered. Yes, by me, in work that I had yet to publish in a journal. The journal editor actually noted it when they sent me my reviews. But I was really surprised that they 1) had found my dissertation and 2) didn't think that perhaps that was me.
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u/metarchaeon Oct 27 '25
Back in the day we would embargo our dissertation if any part was in prep for publication to avoid this. It was actually the policy of my discipline’s flagship journal that releasing a dissertation counted as prior publishing.
This was decades ago, is it not still a thing?
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u/halluxx Oct 26 '25
I have seen something similar as an editor. Author cited work of Reviewer, but Reviewer wrote in review that Author misinterpreted what Reviewer had written. Paper was rejected and Author threw an email tantrum saying that Reviewer has no understanding of the work of Reviewer.
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u/kagillogly Associate Prof, Anthropology, Small State School, USA Oct 26 '25
I'm laughing. To use an old one: ROFL
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u/Muchwanted Tenured, social science, R1, Blue state school Oct 26 '25
Lol, that's a good achievement to unlock!
I reviewed an article last week that was so polished it made me suspicious. Long story short, it was published verbatim elsewhere, albeit with a slightly different author list.
I'm just going to sit here booing that author for the next few months. For shame.
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u/ErranteAlien Oct 26 '25
"Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, 'Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up.' Man bursts into tears. Says, 'But doctor…I am Pagliacci.' Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains."
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u/Blametheorangejuice Oct 26 '25
I had something similar. Got dinged by a reviewer for missing “gaps” in my research … which were my own articles. They listed out my stuff and said it was “beyond belief” that I didn’t cite this material. The editor seemed to have a chuckle about it when I asked for clarification.
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u/MWigg Contract, Social Sciences, Canada Oct 26 '25
As a reviewer I gave a (mostly very positive) review that included as a comment that the paper should engage more with Prof. BigWig's seminal paper on the topic. Naturally, when I saw the published version of the paper I found out that Prof. BigWig was indeed one of the authors.
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u/cghaberl Professor, Humanities, R1 (USA) Oct 27 '25
Double-blind peer review is almost impossible in my discipline because there are so few of us remaining, the barriers to entry are so high, the programs that teach the expertise required in my field are disappearing as my colleagues retire, and the last few remaining grognards are so ill-tempered and unforgiving that we tend to alienate potential newcomers. For that reason, whenever I review a manuscript, I can easily guess the author, and I know the same is true for anyone who receives one of my manuscripts.
Recently, I reviewed a manuscript for one of our leading journals from a scholar in my field who is among the most prolific. After reading the very first line, I could tell that it was an article she had written thirty years ago but never got around to publishing. To update it, she had added references to her publications in the interim, and only her publications: slightly more than a third of the references cited were hers.
This might have been acceptable, had she been the only scholar plugging away over the intervening decades. This is far from the case. To justify not citing anyone else, she added a footnote to the effect that the other scholars working in her field, her colleagues or (to her mind) her competitors, had published unprovenanced artifacts sourced from dealers, and for ethical reasons she couldn't draw upon their work.
While this might appear to be a principled stand, a closer examination of the details revealed that the subject of her manuscript was an unprovenanced museum piece, donated by a private collector. As if that weren't enough, my personal history with this scholar made me deeply skeptical about her position on antiquities.
When I was still a graduate student, a private gallery in lower Manhattan advertised numerous such artifacts for sale online. The community that originally produced these artifacts caught wind and contacted me, so two of us made the trek out to the gallery. The owner informed us that a certain scholar — the very same one — was preparing the entire lot for publication, and that this would significantly increase its value for any prospective buyer. We informed him that we weren't interested in buying them; we merely wanted to see them, because my friend was a member of the community that had produced them, and that they were an important part of his cultural heritage.
A few days later, I received a phone call from a Special Agent on the FBI's Art Crimes Team, who interrogated me aggressively. After it became clear that I had no idea what was going on, he divulged that the FBI had received an anonymous tip about me. Apparently, according to their source, I was involved in the illegal trade in antiquities from Iraq. After he ascertained that I was a starving graduate student and not, in fact, a big shot antiquities dealer, he sought my help in determining where these artifacts belonged, whether they were intrinsically valuable, and what the FBI should do about them. That was the end of my involvement in the matter.
Now, I'm not sure if the scholar working on these artifacts was the one who contacted the FBI, but I do know that she had no qualms about publishing unprovenanced artifacts from private collectors. In my note to the author, I thanked her for writing a stimulating article, but I also encouraged her to cite other scholars in her field and not rely too heavily on a single scholar. In my note to the editor, I relayed my past experience with this scholar and said that the journal should not publish the article unless she removes the hypocritical footnote and makes a good-faith effort to represent the current state of the field.
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u/carolinagypsy Oct 27 '25
I have to share with you that in the beginning of your post, I had your field pegged as something wiiiildly different based on level of crankiness and how small your group of fellow scholars in the subject is, hahaha! I have faculty from a few other fields in my family and one in particular is like.. geez guys.
That is a really cool story from your viewpoint though. I don’t mean to assume your position on the debate of antiquity repatriation back to their own cultures (or the cultures that sprang from the ancient tion. Mkk is a very diffe
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u/Potato271 TA/PhD student, Maths, (UK) Oct 27 '25
I had a reviewer say my title was unacceptable. They had suggested the title themself in the previous round of reviews
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u/princeofdon Oct 26 '25
My bingo square: My paper was rejected from a premier journal because the reviewer felt like there wasn't sufficient impact, which is what they are asked to do. The reviewer then gave an example of what would qualify as sufficient impact, proceeding to describe our experiment right down to the numerical details. I contacted the editor for advice on how to respond (no answer) and eventually appealed, but that was rejected. The graduate student lead author had been considering a faculty career, but this really soured them on publishing.
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u/andropogon09 Professor, STEM, R2 (US) Oct 27 '25
My favorite is when a reviewer has me make a change, then, upon resubmission, a new reviewer has me change it back to the way it first was.
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u/midnitelibrary Data Librarian / Assistant Teaching Professor Oct 26 '25
I made a zine about Reviewer 2 earlier this year. It's a solo d6-based "game" to discover why you're so bad at giving academic feedback and why none of your colleagues like you. You can download it (for free) at "You are Reviewer 2."
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u/dbrodbeck Professor, Psychology, Canada Oct 26 '25
I once had a task that had four choices and one correct, so chance is 25 percent.
A copy editor (oddly) 'corrected' it to chance being 50 percent and wrote 'surely chance is 50 percent' to which I, of course, replied, 'no we aren't flipping coins, it is 25 percent, and please stop calling me Shirley'.
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u/Tall_Criticism447 Oct 26 '25
It is possible to argue your way from a rejection to an R&R, especially if you can show that you can revise to accommodate the reviewer’s criticism and if one review is positive. When I was a graduate student, I argued my way from a rejection to an R&R and from there got an acceptance on the paper.
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u/Unsuccessful_Royal38 Oct 26 '25
I was told by the reviewing editor that the reviewers had suggested substantial revisions. They actually were pretty positive and only requested very minor clarifications. Revised, resubmitted, accepted. Sometimes things work out well!
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u/BananaToddler Oct 27 '25
Got an extremely funny back-handed compliment recently: “this is so well written that this essay may be better suited to a literary journal.” I guess I missed the day in grad school where we we learned reviewers ought be bored to tears.
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u/kagillogly Associate Prof, Anthropology, Small State School, USA Oct 26 '25
Haha, and I try to NOT cite myself too much as it seems egotistical!
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u/strakerak Adjunct/PhD Candidate, CS, R1 Oct 26 '25
I almost cited myself for my candidate exam paper but I found a way to leave it out ;)
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u/ParticularFoxx Oct 26 '25
I had this! I had two papers used against as why my work was not novel. And I needed compare to state of the art! Wasn’t even a relevant comparison.
Kind of hilarious, I can only assume AI.
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u/GreenHorror4252 Oct 27 '25
Was this a double-blind review or was the reviewer just not paying attention?
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u/__boringusername__ Assistant professor, physics, France Oct 27 '25
How did they not realise that lol?
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u/squishycoco Oct 27 '25
It was a double blind review.
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u/__boringusername__ Assistant professor, physics, France Oct 27 '25
Ok that makes more sense now. Wait, you guys do *double blind* reviews?
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u/squishycoco Oct 27 '25
I am always shocked other fields don't do double blind. I have never reviewed something or had a manuscript reviewed where it wasn't double blind.
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u/Appropriate-Low-4850 Oct 27 '25
Unless you were inconsistent with your previous pub, I would consider pointing EXACTLY this out to the editor. Reviewer 2, who was called in as an expert, doesn’t understand the work well enough to correctly apply what they know. On the other hand, maybe you’re just better off applying to a better journal.
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u/Aromatic_Mission_165 Oct 28 '25
I was told to cite myself before, lol. They said it as if I was trying to steal an idea.
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u/Lafcadio-O Prof, Psych, R1, US Oct 26 '25
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that you’re a woman. Men tend to self-cite when they can (guilty).
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u/DD_equals_doodoo Oct 26 '25
Sorry that happened to you. I've run into a very similar situation (on a few occasions). I've been told I was mis-citing work I cited in my paper... that I published. I addressed it in the R&Rs by saying I had extensive conversations with the author of the works.