Elsevier has shut down its finance journal citation cartel following the retraction of 12 papers with 5,104 citations combined. Professor Brian M Lucey of Trinity College Dublin served as editor while approving his own work, bypassing peer review processes. Lucey published 56 papers in 2025 alone at an impossible pace of one paper every 6.5 days.

The operation involved co-authorship trading with Samuel Vigne and systematic citation stacking through the Elsevier Finance Journals Ecosystem. This allowed papers to be transferred between journals without resubmission while artificially inflating citation counts. John Gooddell published 68 papers in a single journal edited by Lucey, demonstrating how the system recycled citations on a massive scale.

Lucey was removed as editor from five Elsevier journals but remains at Wiley's Journal of Economic Surveys. An academic analysis confirmed the cartel operated with overlapping editors coordinated by Lucey, who managed the ecosystem journals. The episode reveals how academic publishing systems can be exploited for personal gain, undermining the integrity of peer review.