Self-citations in six anaesthesia journals and their significance in determining the impact factor

Abstract

Self-citation of a journal may affect its impact factor. We investigated self-citations in the 1995 and 1996 issues of six anaesthesia journals by calculating the self-citing and self-cited rates for each journal. Self-citing rate relates a journal's self-citations to its total number of references. We defined self-cited rate as the ratio of a journal's self-citations to the number of times it is cited by the six anaesthesia journals. We also correlated self-citing rates with the impact factor of the six journals for 1997. Citations among the six journals differed significantly (P < 0.0001). Anesthesiology had the highest self-citing rate (57%). Anaesthesia, Anesthesia and Analgesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia and the European Journal of Anaesthesiology had self-citing rates of 28%, 28%, 30%, 11% and 4% respectively. The self-cited rates were 31%, 35%, 34%, 27%, 31% and 17% for Anaesthesia, Anesthesiology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, British Journal of Anaesthesia, Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia and the European Journal of Anaesthesiology, respectively. North America journals cited the North America literature. This also occurred, to a lesser extent, in the European anaesthesia journals. A significant correlation between self-citing rates and impact factors was found (r = 0.899, P = 0.015). A high self-citing rate of a journal may positively affect its impact factor.

The integration of open access journals in the scholarly communication system: Three science fields

“…Self-citations is a strong own group preference as confirmed by e.g. Fassoulaki (2000), Aksness (2003), Frandsen (2005) and Frandsen (2007). Other, but probably weaker, own group variables are variables describing similarities between the citing and cited journal (e.g.…”

Modified Impact Factors

“…Although some of self-citations may be legitimate, they can distort the scientific literature and opinion of science policymakers. 6,7 Found that high self-citing rate of journal may strongly affect the impact factor.…”

Editorial: Self-citation in Publishing

“…There are numerous sources of potential bias in the rankings, some inherent in the system and some not: selfcitation (articles from the same journal), citation density (the number of references listed), quality of citations, poor comparability between different specializations, mainly use of English language in publications, type of manuscripts, ease of access, and journals not listed in the SCI database are major disadvantages of the IF [1,5,14,16,19,20,25,26,31,35,40,43,47,49]. Based on the IF, a citation from an important journal such as Nature is worth no more than a citation from journals in the lowest tiers of publishing [3,45].…”

“…Self-citation ranges from 7% to 20% of an article's references [13,16,17,25,38]. High self-citation is more common for specialized journals [11,16,25,38,51] and articles with many authors [13].…”

“…High self-citation is more common for specialized journals [11,16,25,38,51] and articles with many authors [13]. Thomson Reuters considers self-citation beyond 20% as suspect of abuse as the journal's IF is higher and prestige enhanced by self-citation [13,16,17,19,20,25,31].…”