Author: Águeda Delgado-Ponce – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion

Endogamy, «social attitude of rejection to the incorporation of members external for the own group or institution» (DRAE, 2016), is, along with the plagiarism, one of the major evils threatening to science, whereas it is given priority to the researcher and his or her social relations in detriment of the own research.

There are several types of actions that can be considered as endogamy and that are not of the same disrepute for the publication, but all equally reprehensible and with some damage to the advancement of science. Among the first would be to give preference to the work of the own publishers or researchers from the circle, of the own University, rather than other items that could have greater scientific value, but which do not have that direct relationship with the magazine. With what is privileged the person more that the content.

Another indicator of endogamy is the self-citation, that the journal cites their own articles, or to be more subtle, establish agreements with other magazines or that the magazines of the same publishing group cite among them, thus having more cites, will raise its impact index. In any case, the aim being sought is not originality, novelty, nor the impact of research.

However, this attitude that abounded some years ago, each time is more easily detected by the evaluators that count with mechanisms to find out the grade of endogamy of a publication and act accordingly. In this way, the excess of self-cites or exchange of cites can be the reason for removal from a magazine of the JCR. Also, most quality magazines have a code of ethics that reflects the commitments also regarding endogamy and thus is collected, for example in “Comunicar”, that “the editors evaluate the articles submitted for publication only on the basis of the scientific merit of the content” being used to avoid bias, an evaluation by blind pairs in which reviewers are unaware of details of authorship of articles.

However, this social attitude of benefiting to the own against the foreign is endemic evil that affects all levels of society, and that by living in the collective imaginary it is very difficult to eradicate. Therefore science, as a champion of changes, should open the way, as it has begun to do, on the basis of objectivity, honesty and commitment with research