A bibliometric approach to the role of author self-citations in scientific communication

Abstract

The present paper analyses the role of author self-citations aiming at finding basic regularities of self-citations within the process of documented scientific communication and thus laying the methodological groundwork for a possible critical view at self-citation patterns in empirical studies at any level of aggregation. The study consists of three parts; the first part of the study is concerned with the comparative analysis of the ageing of selfcitations and of non-self citations, in the second part the possible interdependence between self-citations and foreign citations is analysed and in the third part the interrelation of the share of self-citations in all citations with other citation-based indicators is studied. The outcomes of this study are two-fold; first, the results characterise author self-citations -at least at the macro level -as an organic part of the citation process obeying rules that can be measured and described with the help of mathematical models. Second, these rules can be used in evaluative micro and meso analyses to identify significant deviations from the reference standards.

Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: effects of different calculation methods

“…A faster ageing of self-citations as compared to all citations has been observed in the two fields analysed in this paper. This temporal evolution of self-citations was described for science in the whole world (Schubert et al 2006) and for different countries (Aksnes 2003) and disciplines (Glänzel et al 2004). Different underlying reasons for the faster ageing of self-citations can be mentioned.…”

“…Different studies conclude that there is no reason for suppressing self-citations at the macro level (Glänzel et al 2004, 2006; Glänzel and Thijs 2004a) while their potential effects at the meso level may be more significant (Thijs and Glänzel 2006). On the other hand, their influence at the micro level has been analysed to a lesser degree.…”

“…In other words, a self-citation occurs whenever the set of co-authors of the citing paper and that of the cited one are not disjoint, i.e., when such sets share at least one author (Snyder and Bonzi 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glänzel et al 2004). …”

Detecting h-index manipulation through self-citation analysis

“…Google Scholar (GS) offers the widest coverage of academic communication, but filtering self-citations from its results is currently not reliably possible. And maybe we even should not filter them, since they form an organic part of the citation process [8] and self-citations make up for up to 36% of all citations [1]. This might make it difficult to sharpen the h -index by excluding self-citation as it was already proposed [15].…”

Self-citation of Medical and Non-medical Universities in Northern Iran

“…There are controversial results concerning this issue. As a complex, but natural behavior (22), self-citation heavily depends on research topic, co-authorship network, study time spam and so on (23) and availability of all existing information resorces in libraries and information center (24). Further research is needed to study the self-citation and factors affecting it.…”