Citation Bias: Questionable Research Practice or Scientific Misconduct?

Citation bias occurs when authors preferentially cite research that supports their own findings or claims, or research that showed what they had hoped to find but didn’t find in their research. In research articles, citation bias may occur in the Introduction section, where the researchers argue why their own research is important, and in the Discussion section, where they put their findings into context and perspective. The first use of the term ‘citation bias’, of which I am aware, was not in biomedicine. In 1985, researchers in physics referred to ‘a citation bias against Eastern-bloc [particle] accelerators’.