The network of scientific journals

At the beginning of 2012, Science published a briefly paper about the coercitive action of the editors in most of the scientific journals in world:

We find that coercion is uncomfortably common and appears to be practiced opportunistically⁽¹⁾

One of the most coercitive practice is to say to the authors to cite in their paper more source from the journal where the work is submitted (the practice of coercive self-citation is common in the business disciplines, for example). Now a new research try to describe the interaction between scientific journals with a really particular network:

In the network, an arrow from journal A to journal B represents a “resubmission link,” that is, an article that was submitted to and published by journal B after submission to journal A. This network can be used to learn more about publication strategies and perceived journal importance than is available in citation networks alone⁽²⁾

The idea is: you submit to a journal with an high impact factor, your paper was rejected for example because is too specialistic, and you resubmit to another journal, and in this case your paper is accepted. And, incredible:

Resubmissions were significantly more cited than first-intents published the same year in the same journal⁽²⁾

Keith Bowers, commenting the results of the paper, write on the same issue of Science:

Journal editors could increase the quality of papers published in their own journals by exacting more rigorous standards for revision without rejecting them. Providing authors more opportunities to revise and resubmit manuscripts following peer review, while being clear to authors that substantial improvement must be made before a final decision is reached, would increase the citation impact of an editor's own journal.⁽³⁾

As is he right?

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(1) Wilhite A.W. & Fong E.A. (2012). Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing, Science, 335 (6068) 542-543. DOI: 10.1126/science.1212540
(2) Calcagno V., Demoinet E., Gollner K., Guidi L., Ruths D. & de Mazancourt C. (2012). Flows of Research Manuscripts Among Scientific Journals Reveal Hidden Submission Patterns, Science, 338 (6110) 1065-1069. DOI: 10.1126/science.1227833
(3) Bowers E.K. (2012). Journals: Increase Revisions, Not Rejections, Science, 338 (6110) 1029-1029. DOI: 10.1126/science.338.6110.1029-a