Publishing an article in a journal that quotes from that journal...

[bfat]

Is this a faux pas? I wrote a kind of interesting historiography/film studies/genre paper on historical films about baseball, and I was thinking about submitting it to the journal NINE. But because this is such a specialized journal (baseball and American culture), a few of the sources I cited in my paper were actually from that journal. Will this be looked at strangely, or is it acceptable to reference articles that have been posted in the same journal? I can't remember ever having seen it before...

Thanks!

[lewin]

In psychology we cite stuff from the same journal all the time. The best research goes into the same small set of top journals, so that's what you cited. Maybe somebody from English can pop in and say whether it's different in your field.

ETA: In psych it would look strange to not cite anything from the journal you're submitting to.

Edited July 12, 2012 by lewin00

[booksnlooks]

I can't say for sure with this particular journal, as I'm not familiar with it, but I would say it's a good thing to cite from the same journal that you're submitting to. It would show that your work fits in with their journal and the existing literature in that field.

[fuzzylogician]

You cite the sources that are relevant for your arguments, and you publish in the best venue that is both relevant to your work and willing to accept it. I don't see why it would be a problem to publish in a journal that has also published some of the work you cite.

More precisely: how do you choose where to send your paper? one common way is to see where other similar work has been published in the past. Publishing in a journal that has no history of being interested in papers like yours will make your paper less accessible to researchers in your field (they won't expect papers that are relevant to their work to appear in that journal) and generally increases your risk of being rejected. So: I think it would be a ridiculous requirement if a journal would only publish papers that don't cite works from that same journal! (not to mention that it would be close to impossible in small (sub)fields.)

[TakeruK]

I also think it would be a good thing to cite past articles from the same journal -- this is a good thing for their stats. There are even some journals with the shady editorial practice of requiring submitted articles to cite X number of former articles in past issues of their journal. I say it's shady because I think the intention that authors demonstrate their work fits with the journal's field is a valid one, there are other ways to show this and forcing authors to cite certain papers is just wrong, in my opinion!

By the way, in my field, we sometimes cite papers that are appearing in the SAME issue of the same journal (we usually see preprints before they are published, or one or more of the coauthors could be involved in both papers etc.).

[bfat]

Thanks, everyone, this is really helpful. This will be my first real journal submission, so I wasn't sure what the protocol was. I was pretty sure there was no requirement for there to be no citations from the same journal, I just didn't know if it was considered tacky in some way. Glad to know it's not!

Thanks again!