Has your work been omitted by others or have you knowingly ignored others? Take the survey

This month The Scientist is covering an important topic Citation Amnesia. Along with the great articles covering the topic there is also a citation amnesia survey where you can answer and comment on questions such as:

How often has highly relevant work by you been ignored in subsequent publications by others?

How often have you knowingly failed to cite relevant papers from others?

Tell us how Citation practice could be improved.

Not interested in participanting but curious to see what other scientists have said. View the ongoing citation amnesia survey results

After reading though the survey results, I find it puzzling that an editor or publisher would discourage an author from including a complete and through list of references. After all, it is the citations that drive both impact factors and authors' H-numbers. Such a tactic seems to be self-defeating.

As for the claim of some authors that a failure to cite earlier work might diminish the "novelty" of their work, even the most rudimentary search tool will expose their dishonesty and should trigger some pointed questions by experienced reviewers.

The results do not surprise me. But the results throw rally very little light on what goes behind. The approaches are symptomatic rather than incisive. The issue is ethical and not moral and these distinctions are often blurred. For all the money we wasted as researchers and science adminsitrators on citation analyses making ISI rich, we have not understood the main purpose of citations ( as these are practised) being to get a grip on publication world of commerical and interest groups and not on self serving end of impact factors.
I would have liked to see whether citation malpractices actually have been instantiated with a deep harm to progress of science and its impact on society. We reported one such instance which is under investigation.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/03/indian_researcher_charges_jour.html
Indeed there is a way to conduct surveys to define journal bias by carefully designed questionnaire to be analyzed by Bayesian belief approaches. It is also possible define a priori that these scenarios are an inevitable outcome of commercialization of research and its publications. We will be happy to share these with the readers of scientist when these are implemented /published.

The reason a publisher wants to limit the number of citations is to keep the number of pages down. More pages = more money. Considering the limitation is based on the cost of printed pages, having an online list of references makes a lot of sense.