In 1984 the European Commission issued the Eighth Company Law Directive requiring each member State to ensure that its national rules met common standards for the education, training and qualification of statutory auditors (84/253/EEC; OJ 1984 L126/20). The Directive insisted that national...

The growing institutional significance of impact factors and journal rankings currently stands alongside serious concerns about the scale and distorting effects of the practice of coercive journal self-citation. Survey-based studies have highlighted journals suspected of such coercion but there...