Elsevier fired a third finance editor, John Goodell, after an investigator exposed an industrial-scale citation cartel spanning hundreds of papers across multiple journals.
Key Takeaways
Goodell’s annual output jumped from ~5 papers/year to 58 in 2023 after co-authors Brian Lucey and Samuel Vigne gifted him 100+ authorships at journals they controlled.
The cartel mechanism: Goodell accepted submissions at RIBAF and was added as co-author on submitters’ papers at other journals in return – a textbook quid pro quo.
Goodell accumulated 15,663 citations and 4,203 in 2025 alone; his citation profile shows the exponential J-curve pattern characteristic of citation rings.
One collaborator, Anna Min Du, published 22 papers in a single journal in 2024-2025 and added Goodell to 14 of her papers elsewhere; she appeared to scrub then restore her Google Scholar listings during the investigation.
Elsevier replaced editors but left hundreds of suspect papers standing; the investigator estimates 200-350 papers are retractable across active and former collaborators.
Hacker News Comment Review
The sole substantive comment flags discomfort with the polemical tone of the writeup – noting the prose style is unusual for a scientific accountability context, even if the underlying facts hold.
No broader technical or structural debate on Elsevier’s peer-review architecture, retraction mechanics, or h-index gaming has emerged yet in the thread.
Notable Comments
@ChrisMarshallNY: flags the “pithy language” as jarring in a scientific context, independent of whether the fired editors deserved it.
