Bibliometric analysis of 71 best practice guidelines (WASP) related to scientific writing

In the world of academic publishing, it is likely that the most prominent best practice guidelines (BPGs), encompassing ethical practices, are those of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). In this paper, we conducted a citation analysis of 71 Write a Scientific Paper (WASP) BPGs, which were all published in Elsevier’s Early Human Development (EHD) during 2018-2019, exclusively by University of Malta researchers. Many of those WASP BPGs were linked to and used by commercial training courses. The 71 WASP BPGs accrued 346 citations by 12 April 2023, 66 being self-citations of EHD, with most citations (75, or 22%) to a 2018 paper by Victor E. Grech and Sarah Cuschieri (DOI: 10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2018.01.001). The analysis was repeated on 11 February 2025, revealing that the 71 WASP BPGs had accumulated a total of 478 citations. In April 2023, Grech and Cuschieri had gained a total of 245 and 137 citations, respectively across all of the WASP BPGs, and by February 2025, those values had risen to 309 and 157, respectively. An editorial expression of concern (EoC) was published in 2021, but is disguised as an “Editorial Note”. That EoC encompasses 48 of the WASP BPGs, an EoC “clustering” method that is not the best publishing practice. This bibliometric analysis reveals how a single COPE member journal published, on behalf of an independent group of Malta researchers, 71 BPGs, most of which have an EoC associated with them, and some of which (30 papers, 42%) have been retracted. The underlying message of this case study is that there are grave risks (reputational and otherwise) with amassing such independent BPGs in a single journal.