Institutional self-citation rates: A three year study of universities in the United States

Abstract

Using Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) data, this paper calculated institutional self citations rates (ISCRs) for 96 of the top research universities in the United States from 2005-2007. Exhibiting similar temporal patterns of author and journal self-citations, the ISCR was 29% in the first year post-publication, and decreased significantly in the second year post-publication (19%). Modeling the data via power laws revealed total publications and citations did not correlate with the ISCR, but did correlate highly with ISCs. California Institute of Technology exhibited the highest ISCR at 31%. Academic and cultural factors are discussed in relation to ISCRs.

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

“…As noted earlier that the rate of self-citations less than 20% is acceptable (7), it can be said that the rate of self-citedness in the studied universities was in suitable level. The rate of self-citation in some studies was reported to be more than the acceptable level, such as 29% in American research institutions (18) and 17.75% in the publication of American Psychology Association (19). Although the self-cited papers are assumed to help the explanation of theories, the formation of research questions and designation of research methods, irrelevant self-citation that could not help the author in his/her work or the readers in their understanding the context challenges the self-citedness and raises the question of citing these resources for increasing the citation count in an non-scientific manner (20).…”

“…For example, despite its highest rate in self-citation among the studied universities, Gilan University had only 5% of self-citations. As a resresearch ult, more paper production does not always increase the rate of self-citation (18). The confirmation of hypothesis 3 is another witness to this opinionin that no significant relationship was seen between published papers and self-citations.…”

“…The study on the self-citation rate in 96 top American academic research institutions in the three-year time spam of 2007-2007 showed that the rate of self-citation among these institutions was 19% in total and the highest rate was 29% in the first year of publication and changed into 19% in the subsequent years, respectively (18). …”

Topic-based heterogeneous rank

“…Papers and their cited references were collected from the Web of Science (WoS) from the period from 1956 to 2014. Search strategies were based on the following terms (including plurals and variants) which were determined by checking Library of Congress Self-citations in a citation network can be categorized in three different levels (1) author level (Aksnes 2003;Hyland 2003;Glänzel and Thijs 2004) (2) journal level (Tsay 2006;Krauss 2007;Frandsen 2007) and (3) research group level (Van Raan 2008;Hendrix 2009). The issue of self-citations has been handled in different ways.…”

From Excessive Journal Self-Cites to Citation Stacking: Analysis of Journal Self-Citation Kinetics in Search for Journals, Which Boost Their Scientometric Indicators

“…With the establishment of bibliometric indicators and standards, they started to affect the careers, funding, and reputation of individuals, their institutions and journals themselves. This brought self-citations in all their forms into the spotlight, creating numerous controversies among scholars [ 1 ]. Already over a half century ago, Garfield and Sher calculated that 8% of citations were author self-citation, and 20% of citations were journal self-citations [ 2 ].…”