The problem of self-citation

But this is a complex issue as there are several things involved in this mess of citations.

What if there are no other papers to cite as the subject is unique??

A controversial article in Science in 1990, suggests that more than half of all academic articles remain uncited five years after their publication (1). In desperation some researchers cite their own papers.

Most researchers in less developed countries complain that their papers are never cited despite doing good work. So they try to cite their own work or their colleagues’ work to help them.

The Web of Science shows that papers authored by scientists in China, India and Russia are more likely to be ignored than are those written in the United States and Europe. But the database doesn’t track many regional-language journals that, if taken into consideration, would narrow the gap (3). These countries naturally have high self-citation rates(4).

There is also an ‘youth effect’ as early-career scientists don’t have many papers and didn’t have time to amass many citations.

Then there is a thing called ‘physics effect’

Image source: nature.com

Stanford University Identifies Top 2% Scientists based on their paper citations (a ranking of the world's most-cited scholars). Now researchers want to get into this list.

Citation metrics are incredibly important for scientists and are often used as indicators to determine the relevance and importance of a given research topic. The Stanford research team used common citation indicators, including H-index, co-authorship, and a composite indicator for career-long impact to create the dataset.

Applications for grants to follow up the earlier research fails, most often, because the papers based on that work have never been cited. This is a huge problem for scientists.

So some self-cite. Some professors who get into authors’ list because of their students’ work, and also those who do collaborative work get into the list easily. A professor I know is on editor’s panel of several journals run by his own university. To appease him several researchers cite his papers. So he got into the list of Stanford University!

Those who cannot have these advantages really get desperate and quote themselves! Self-manipulation (2)! The self-citation farms are far more common than we believe.

Citation manipulation refers to the following types of behaviour(2):

• Excessive citation of an author’s research by the author (ie, self-citation by authors) as a means solely of increasing the number of citations of the author’s work;

• Excessive citation of articles from the journal in which the author is publishing a research article as a means solely of increasing the number of citations of the journal; or

• Excessive citation of the work of another author or journal, sometimes referred to as ‘honorary’ citations (eg, the editor-in-chief of the journal to which one is submitting a manuscript or a well-known scholar in the field of the researcher) or ‘citation stacking’ solely to contribute to the citations of the author(s)/ journal(s) in question.

In the past few years, researchers have been paying closer attention to self-citation. A 2016 preprint, for instance, suggested that male academics cite their own papers, on average, 56% more than female academics do, although a replication analysis last year suggested that this might be an effect of higher self-citation among productive authors of any gender, who have more past work to cite.

Although many scientists agree that excessive self-citation is a problem, there is little consensus on how much is too much or on what to do about the issue. In part this is because researchers have many legitimate reasons to cite their own work or that of colleagues (4). To solve this problem, some researchers are suggesting publication of self-citation index or s-index.

This is a highly uneven world. Unless you have a level playing field, manipulations tend to happen in a highly competitive world.

Before complaining, first these things have to be looked into and should get a thorough wash-up.

Footnotes:

1. Publishing by—and for?—the Numbers
2. https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_DD_A4_Citation_Manipulatio...
3. The science that’s never been cited
4. Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database