Why do journals like lots of references?

Eugen G Tarnow  June 5 2010 11:50:45 PM

I recently had a paper rejected because it did not have enough references.  It was suggested since the average number of references in articles on free recall is forty, my five references just were not enough.

The editor was kind enough to supply thirty-some references that would be appropriate.  The first one suggested seemed irrelevant but I am still going through the others.  I noticed that four of them belonged to the editor himself.

I assume this means that being an editor of a journal is correlated with getting more citations.  Somebody ought to check this out to see what the editorial dynamics is.

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