On the relation between the degree of internationalization of cited and citing publications: A field level analysis, including and excluding self-citations

Abstract

The growing complexity of scientific challenges demands increasingly intense research collaboration, both domestic and international. The resulting trend affects not only the modes of producing new knowledge, but also the way it is disseminated within scientific communities. This paper analyses the relationship between the "degree of internationalization" of a country's scientific production and that of the relevant citing publications. The empirical analysis is based on 2010-2012 Italian publications. Findings show: i) the probability of being cited increases with the degree of internationalization of the research team; ii) totally domestic research teams tend to cite to a greater extent totally domestic publications; iii) vice versa, publications resulting from international collaborations tend to be more cited by totally foreign publications rather than by publications including domestic authors. These results emerge both at overall and at discipline level. Findings might inform research policies geared towards internationalization.

The effects of citation-based research evaluation schemes on self-citation behavior

“…Aksnes also finds a positive correlation between the number of self-citations and the number of authors of the publications (Aksnes, 2003). It is also known that internationally co-authored publications are more highly self-cited than domestic (Adams, 2013;Kumar, Rohani, & Ratnavelu, 2014), and this holds true for the publications with Italian co-authors (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Murgia, 2017) whether or not the Italian self-citations are included (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2020).…”