Exploring Citations for Conflict of Interest Detection in Peer Review System

Peer review in scientific communications plays an important role in the advancement of any given field of study. However, different sorts of conflict of interest (COI) situations between authors and reviewers can compromise the review decision. Current COI detection systems primarily rely on co-authors networks, inferred from publicly available bibliographic databases as an implicit measure of collaborative and social relationships between researchers. However, different citations relationships have also been claimed to be indicative of various social and cognitive relationships between authors. This can be useful to identify those hidden relationships that can not be handled by traditional systems. This paper is an effort in the direction where we investigate to find any pattern in citations that can predict existence or non-existence of social relationships. It also explores citations relationships as a potential indicator of different types of cognitive relationships between researchers.