‘Elite capture’ of top journals prompts ‘gatekeeping’ concerns

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”.

The extent of nepotistic practices may, however, be worse than the analysis can quantify, says the paper. For instance, “future reciprocity”, in which an editor accepts an author’s paper and later receives reciprocal treatment, is more difficult to conclusively prove, although the authors found 43 cases where this was likely to have occurred.

With academic hiring or promotion in business schools highly dependent on publication in FT50 journals, the “gatekeeping” role held by a relatively small group of scholars (acting as journal editors or co-authors) should come under closer scrutiny, explained Raffaele Ciriello, senior lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School, who co-authored the study with Vitali Mindel, who is based at Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

The same questions could also be applied to other disciplines where publication in elite journals is crucial for career advancement, he added.

“Academic publishing has become a multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded industry in which elite journal editors make career- and field-shaping decisions under unusually weak oversight,” Ciriello told Times Higher Education, adding: “Our new Journal of Business Ethics paper shows why this is no longer enough.”

“The deeper problem is elite capture: a small, densely connected group has accumulated disproportionate control over highly valuable publication opportunities and the money, careers, status and authority that follow from them,” he continued.

“When the same gatekeepers evaluate one another’s work, scholarship risks drifting away from meritocratic service to society and towards insider interests.”

That problem, however, is particularly acute for business journals, particularly those in the FT50 group where academics are explicitly told to publish. At some institutions, FT50 publications “carry five-figure bonuses…in some cases reaching up to 22 per cent of annual base salary”, the paper adds, noting that “anecdotal evidence suggests this practice is not exceptional”.

However, the study found evidence for a “much lower COI prevalence outside the FT50”, which “suggests that these patterns proliferate where incentives are strongest and oversight weakest”, said Ciriello.

“Universities therefore co-produce the conditions for elite capture by attaching disproportionate rewards and authority to FT50 publication while demanding little accountability from the journals themselves,” he said.

The authors are now extending their analysis to 16 FT50 journals “despite near-zero institutional appetite to fund this labour-intensive research”, said Ciriello. “Emerging patterns are consistent with our published findings,” he said.

Asked how journal editors and institutions might address the problems identified, Ciriello said more transparency over editorial decisions and institutional incentives was required, while editors should be quicker to remove themselves when COIs arose.

“Meaningful reform requires tempered prestige incentives, enforced COI recusal, public disclosure of editorial decision-makers, and auditable COI absence as a condition of elite journal status,” said Ciriello, adding: “Exceptional authority requires exceptional accountability.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com