Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions

Abstract

There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of selfcitations, i.e. citations of one's own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists' behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science's main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.

How much is too much? The difference between research influence and self-citation excess

“…Citations are widely considered to be an indicator of a published work's significance but how can an analyst confirm whether a high citation count for an individual is a genuine reflection mark of influence or a consequence of other factors such as extraordinary, even excessive, self-referencing? The question is pertinent because self-citation has featured in recent publications that address the possible misrepresentation of research performance by individuals and, specifically, attempts to game citation scores (Baccini et al 2019;D'Antuono and Ciavarella 2019;Kacem et al 2019;Peroni et al 2019;Seeber et al 2019).…”

Can citation metrics predict the true impact of scientific papers?

“…It is consensually acknowledged that a reliable, open, and joined‐up data system capable of measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity (e.g., books, teaching, patents, presentations at conference meetings) is needed . Furthermore, the number of self‐citations among researchers increased in the last years, probably due to the introduction of the bibliometric quantification and its relation with the possibility of career progression, which raised several concerns .…”

A Simple Paradigm for Augmenting the Euclidean Index to Reflect Journal Impact and Visibility

“…Indeed, impact/visibility is highly sought among economists; to evince this point, Attema, Brouwer, and Van Exel (2014) performed a health-based time-tradeoff analysis and concluded that respondents (economists) would sacrifice half a thumb for a publication in the elite American Economic Review! 2 Hereafter, it is presumed that each scholar's citations are reported on a per-author basis, or equivalent (Schreiber, 2008); citations accumulated by each article are adjusted in some way for article age (Egghe, 2006;Hirsch, 2005;Jin, 2007;Sidiropoulos, Katsaros, & Manolopoulos, 2007); scholars are presumed to be from the same field or to have had their citation lists adjusted to permit interfield comparisons (Haley, 2017a;Haley & McGee, 2018;Iglesias & Pecharromán, 2007;Leydesdorff, Zhou, & Bornmann, 2013;Radicchi, Fortunato, & Castellano, 2008); and all citations lists should be equally treated insofar as self citations and database source (Haley, 2013(Haley, , 2014Seeber, Cattaneo, Meoli, & Malighetti, 2019).…”