3 (self-referencing) and Fig. A citation rate is the average number of citations received by a group of papers published in one research field in a given year. Each graph includes Q1, Median, Q3 and the lower and upper thresholds (set at 1.5 and 3 times the inter-quartile range, IQR) for indicative outliers (see Fig. The rate of self-citation increases progressively across most of the spread of researchers. The phenomenon of self-citation has long interested bibliometricians, sociologists of science, and scientists and scholars themselves (Kaplan 1965; Meadows and OConnor 1971; Chubin and Moitra 1975; Narin 1976; Tagliacozzo 1977; Porter 1977; Garfield 1979; Lawani 1982; Peritz 1983; Brooks 1985, 1986; Trimble 1986;Merton 1988; MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1989; Bonzi and Snyder 1991; Bott and Hargens 1991, for example). Citations, citation indicators, and research quality: An overview of basic concepts and theories. We agree with a possible criticism that the group of researchers analysed here may not be wholly representative of their field since they are generally likely to be more experienced in building a substantial portfolio of well-cited publications. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Glnzel, W., Thijs, B., & Schlemmer, B. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,64(11), 23322339. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195773. Self-citations in scientific literature. (2015). Data are plotted both as a linear and as a log-normal plot. Select the "Cited by" link and selecting the "Search within articles citingXYZ work" checkbox to discover the impact of a work. Note Citation counts for a year are the number of citations in the peer-reviewed literature for articles published in that year. (1986). The median citation rate at two years for Covid-19 articles in the top journals across all eight fields is 120.79 (p = <0.001). This certainly cautions against any simple test of inappropriate behaviour and confirms the need for informed scrutiny and interpretation. 2019). Social crowdsourcing tools such as Scholarometer have been proposed to address this need. ISBN 978-84-9048-519-4. Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender. The expected number of citations articles of the same field, publication type, and publication year have received within the same time period is 18. To aid in interpretation, therefore, we adopted a graphical approach and both linear and log plots and analyses of referencing and citing rates were examined. Bott, D. M., & Hargens, L. L. (1991). Schreiber, M. (2009). On the shoulders of Robert Merton: Towards a normative theory of citation. An explanatory and interpretive example for Chemistry, which had 240 Highly Cited Researchers in the 2019 dataset, is shown in Fig. This is a consequence of the relatively large number of (often annually refreshed) review papers in these fields. (2018). Scientometrics,72(3), 427437. American Sociological Review,22(6), 635659. More recently, advanced models for a dynamic analysis of citation aging have been proposed. The influence of author self-citations on bibliometric meso-indicators: The case of European universities. (2008). This raises questions about editorial and refereeing standards and the ability of the research base to manage its own affairs. Kim, S. Y., & Kim, Y. In response, the scientific field has dedicated enormous amounts of resources to researching the virus and its effects. Note: FWCIs in Scopus will only take into account citations from articles indexed in Scopus (i.e., citations from publications that are not indexed in Scopus will not be factored into an article's FWCI in Scopus). We found that the WOS database included 76% of the Covid-19 papers contained within the journals themselves. ", "The use of journal impact factors and citation analysis in the evaluation of science", "The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index", "Papers with shorter titles get more citations", "Protein measurement with the Folin phenol reagent", "Beat it, impact factor! 267278). (2012). In fact, later in the 1980s Merton predicted it in conversations with staff at the Institute for Scientific Information (D. Pendlebury, pers. More recent studies include those of Glnzel and colleagues (Glnzel et al. Keep in mind that citation rates are calculated from the citation counts of The prevalence of synchronous self-citation practices at the institutional level. PLoS ONE, 12(12), article number e0187394. The disciplines chosen were respiratory, cardiology, immunology, radiology, microbiology, gastroenterology and hepatology, general and internal medicine, and multidisciplinary sciences. Scientometrics,91(3), 943953. A high level of self-citation may also reflect a certain insularity in terms of area of investigation, but what it does not signal is broad or community-wide influence (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1989; van Raan 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel et al. Examples: For Articles in the field . Elsevier Scopus provides traditional citation counts, the Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and benchmarking. (1983). Journal of Informetrics,14(2), 100990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2019.100990. Ideas in Ecology and Evaluation,7(1), 12. 2019). The quantitative aspect may not be associated with quality of the publications. The influence of self-citation corrections and the fractionalised counting of multi-authored manuscripts on the Hirsch index. (2017). Lawani, S. M. (1982). Ferrara, E., & Romero, A. E. (2013). Total citations, or average citation count per article, can be reported for an individual author or researcher. 2010; Kim and Kim 2018). van Raan, A. F. J. When negative binomial regression is used to minimize the influence of other variables such as article number variation and field of research, Covid-19 papers have still experienced more than 80% increase in citations relative to non-Covid-19 papers. is reasonable to infer that these rates are higher than those for all papers in This is very important when considering tests for outliers. Scientometrics,73(3), 321330. Part I: Articles and their characteristics", Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, "Relation between online "hit counts" and subsequent citations: Prospective study of research papers in the BMJ", "Can Tweets Predict Citations? In every field, except Mathematics, the median and lower indicative threshold self-citing rates (to the highly cited papers) are lower but more variable than that of the self-referencing (from the highly cited papers) (Fig. Self-citations and scientific evaluation: Leadership, influence, and performance. Publish or Perish, Commercial versus Open Access, Internet versus Libraries? It indexes o ver 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers across the disciplines.. To find the citation counts to your own articles: This analysis, like others before, has been about individual self-citation by researchers. An index to quantify an individuals scientific research output. Field weighted citation impact (FWCI) is calculated by dividing the total number of citations an article has received the year it was published and 3 complete calendar years after its publication by the average number of citations articles of the same field, publication type, and publication year are expected to receive within the same time period. The identification of a fixed fraction, such as the upper decile, as outliers is evidently inappropriate. Note that we are excluding citations from 2017, as RCRs exclude the first calendar year in which the article was published. The average citation per article for these publications was 8.1. Nonetheless, since the earliest publications on self-citation, suspicion of self-citation continues amidst uncertainty as to whether it is in fact to be considered sui generis, discounted, or even removed entirely in any analysis of influence or impact. In I. Rafols, J. Molas-Gallart, E. Castro-Martinez & R. Woolley (Eds. With three journals each from eight fields, a total of 24 journals were selected (Table 1). A generalized view of self-citation: Direct, co-author, collaborative, and coercive induced self-citation. Inclusion of these would undoubtedly have increased the volume of papers and affected the results, though the direction or magnitude of change is unclear. Calculating the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR). Annalen der Physik,18(9), 607621. While originality and priority are goals for scientists, self-promotion at the cost of disinterestedness and humility was to Merton, and is today, a violation at least in terms of community ideals if not always in reality (Macfarlane and Cheng 2008; Anderson et al. Rather than setting a percentage of author self-citation above which an individual would be eliminated from consideration, we examined the distributions of author self-citation rates (and author self-referencing rates) for each of the 21 fields to determine true outliers. By comparison, there are points on a higher trajectory and, while these were largely between the low and high statistical indicators, some exceed the high indicative outlier threshold value. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.12.004. Profesional de la Informacin,27(2), 241253. The correlation between the rates of self-citation to and from the highly cited papers of each researcher was calculated and was highly significant within every field. in 2008 received 20.42 citations. An annual value that measures the citation impact of a title (i.e., journal, book series, conference proceeding or trade journal; includes special issues). Bensman, S. J., Smolinsky, L. J., & Pudovkin, A. I. Researchers are selected for their publication output in one or more of the 21 fields used in ESI or across several fields (Appendix Table1). The h-index and self-citations. We have created a publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, coauthorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator. It takes into account the year of publication, document type and disciplines associated with its source. Following the 2021 release of the Web of Science Group's Journal Citation Report (JCR 2021) and Scopus' CiteScore, 46 of the journals published by Frontiers have a Journal Impact Factor and 57 journals have a CiteScore. Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. We conduct our search using keywords Covid-19, coronavirus, and sars-cov-2 to locate publications with these words in the title. The RCR is calculated by taking an article's average annual citation rate (excluding the first calendar year in which the article was published) and dividing it by the expected citation rate of articles in the same co-citation network that were published in the same year. Your parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark. Self-citation can inflate h-index. Consequently, citation rates should not be interpreted as representing the central tendency of the distribution. The citation rate in any single year can serve as a baseline to assess the impact of a paper in the same research field published in that year. received by all papers in all fields published during the 10-year period divided The dataset used for this analysis was the Web of Science list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2019. [54] Field-dependent factors are usually listed as an issue to be tackled not only when comparison across disciplines are made, but also when different fields of research of one discipline are being compared. Clinical medicine is the largest field (448 Highly Cited Researchers). Furthermore, publication and citation data are universally skewed and we will show that this is true of the range of self-citation rates across researchers. Our focus was not the detection of gaming, which carries motive, but rather to identify evidence of the peer recognition that is the ultimate coin of the domain of science and scholarship (Merton 1995) and that yet permits the inclusion of self-citation which, as summarized above, proves to be an integral component of research publication and communication and far too difficult to treat on a case-by-case basis within a large dataset. 2004, 2006; Glnzel and Thijs 2004a, b; Schubert et al. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0745-2. To examine this more closely, we randomly selected three journals included for this paper and manually searched each journals website for Covid-19-related articles that the journal itself had categorized as an original piece of research over three months. Fister, I., Fister, I., & Perc, M. (2016). Each graph includes Q1, Median, Q3 and the lower and upper thresholds (set at 1.5 and 3 times the inter-quartile range, IQR) for indicative outliers. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090140304. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science,23(2), 2546. Additionally, citation rate for Covid-19 papers has been assessed previously without direct comparison to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals [20]. Scientometrics,15(56), 437447. The number of researchers selected for the field is based on the square root of the population of unique authors listed on the fields highly cited papers (Price 1971; Egghe 1987). Does co-authorship inflate the share of self-citations? (2019). Davis, P. M. (2009). Content analysis of references: Adjunct or alternative to citation counting. This suggests that journal impact factor, which is a product of the number of citations that recently published articles receive, will likely be drastically influenced by the number of Covid-19 papers that a journal has included within its pages in the previous years. https://beckerguides.wustl.edu/impactofpublications, Quantifying the Impact of My Publications, publication_data h_index m_index research_impact quantification_publication_data. Mathematics has a lower Citation Their study found no penalty for self-citation but diminishing returns with respect to generating citations from others beyond a certain point. Journal self-citations: Analyzing the JIF mechanism. ISBN-13: 978-3527337040. Finally, articles containing the keywords Covid-19, coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2 in the title were selected to provide an average citation rate for Covid-19-related articles. [25][26][27][28], As early as 2004, the BMJ published the number of views for its articles, which was found to be somewhat correlated to citations. ), countries represented by the authors of the citing works, subject focus or discipline of the citing works. The influence of international collaboration on the impact of research results: Some simple mathematical considerations concerning the role of self-citations. [44][45][46], The evidence that author-self-archived ("green") OA articles are cited more than non-OA articles is somewhat stronger than the evidence that ("gold") OA journals are cited more than non-OA journals. A review of studies on citing behavior. It allows for contextual understanding as to the nature, purpose and motivation of the citingauthor/s and is a traditional tool for measuring impact using publication data. Average citation rate for publications in a number research fields. Any paper published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific,98(610), 13471348. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(198909)40:5%3c342:AID-ASI7%3e3.0.CO;2-U. When controlling for influence of field categorization and article numbers, Covid-19 papers received 84% more citations than non-Covid-19 papers in the non-randomized sample (p<0.001, 95% CI [1.222.45]). To address this gap in the literature we use WOS to examine citation rates for Covid-19-related articles published between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 across 24 major scientific journals. A macro study of self-citation. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers, shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median. The rhetoric-first model. Leydesdorff, L., & Milojevi, S. (2012). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Disentangling Gold Open Access. Scientometrics,42(3), 423428. Regional cases increased rapidly over the next weeks, and scientists worldwide began to take notice. [8][9] Similarly, review papers are more often cited than regular research papers because they summarize results from many papers. [1][2][3][4][5] Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics,[6][7] specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. Referencing as persuasion. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24046. This final point is important because it changes our focus for the future. Small (2004) offered a synthesis of motives for citation, in which citations serve a dual function as vehicles of peer recognition and constructed symbols for specific original achievements. In practice, self-citation seems rarely to be an activity located at one pole or the otherdisinterestedness (Mertonian) or interestedness (social constructivist)but generally to occupy some middle ground along a spectrum of motivations and meanings. table reveals that on average, a paper from a Geosciences research field published in 2008 received 9.55 citations, and a paper from an Immunology research field published in 2008 received 20.42 citations. The following excerpt from a Citation Rates table reveals that on The self-cited rate of scientific journals and the manipulation of their impact factors. Thus, we can consider the core referencing behaviour of the overall group of Highly Cited Researchers, as research leaders, to be in accordance with precedents previously established. Priorities in scientific discovery: A chapter in the sociology of science. SCOPUS provides evidence of collaboration with other scientists and organizations, publication productivity, cited-by works, the h-index and also includes tools for creating citation graphs and Wordle maps. Journal of Informetrics,10(2), 365391. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017571. Some results on function and quality of citations. This table shows some sample publications A-D that are in different subjects, and have different document types. The Citation Report feature displays bar charts for the number of items published each year and the number of citations each year, plus counts for the average number of citations per item, the number of citations per year per publication, average number of citations per year per publication, and the H-index. We estimated the effect of Covid-19 subject on citation counts using a negative binomial regression model. In many journals, there was discrepancy between the number of Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World,3, 122. Thus, data include a combination of open-access and subscription-based publications in the non-Covid-19 articles. Citations can be an indicator of publication significance, utility, attention, visibility or short-term impact but analysts need to confirm whether a high citation count for an individual is a genuine reflection of influence or a consequence of extraordinary, even excessive, self-citation. The highest concentrations of 'citation elite' researchers were in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Belgium. table displays aggregate data for each of the 22 ESI research fields. (2020). 2020, Vol. Scarpa and Baccini and colleagues have reported that the Italian national research assessment exercise (VQR, Research Quality Evaluation), initiated at the beginning of the past decade, provoked strategic behavior among researchers, especially those early in their careers, that resulted in significantly higher rates of self-citation than previously seen (Scarpa et al. Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate Analytics, 160 Blackfriars Road, London, SE1 8EZ, UK, Martin Szomszor,David A. Pendlebury&Jonathan Adams, The Policy Institute, Kings College London, 22 Kingsway, London, WC2B 6LE, UK, You can also search for this author in As examples: for the ESI field of Chemistry (Fig. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23728. Extending the Mertonian norms: Scientists subscription to norms of research. Is collaboration among scientists related to the citation impact of papers because their quality increases with collaboration? ESI is a compilation of science performance statistics and science trends data using data from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. Scientometrics,109(3), 19892005. If, therefore, a self-citation is interpreted primarily as self-reward, the distance to self-promotion is not far away, and that behavior rubs up against the norm of disinterestedness which proscribes self-aggrandizement (Merton 1942). A series of disconnected points, rather more extended than in other fields, lies above this crossing the low and then the high indicative outlier threshold. Larivive, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1779-8. Jonathan Adams. We then quantify the number of citations these papers have received and compare rates to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals over the same timeframe. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2018.mar.03. Citation rates of journal articles, chapters, and books. (Eds.). *Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers Neuroscience journal series, in the Neuroscience subject area (JCR 2021 update). Such reasons imply behaviors that conform both to Mertonian norms and also to the social constructivist interpretation of citation theory (Merton 1942; Kaplan 1965; Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975; Gilbert 1977; Cozzens 1989; Bonzi and Snyder 1991; White 2001; Bornmann and Daniel 2008; Davis 2009; Erikson and Erlandson 2014; Tahamtan and Bornmann 2018, 2019; Aksnes et al. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631277100100107. Institutional self-citation rates: A three-year study of universities in the United States. The trajectory changes at the higher end, curving upwards towards much greater self-citation rates. Academic misconduct, misrepresentation and gaming: A reassessment. Thus, more funding opportunities are available at the researcher level for research that focuses on Covid-19. Scopus also offers a Citation Tracker feature that allows for a listing of articles, web sources and patents that cite a particular publication since 1996. Each graph includes Q1, Median, Q3 and the lower and upper thresholds (set at 1.5 and 3 times the inter-quartile range, IQR) for indicative outliers (see Fig. The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in the last year to articles published in the previous two years. It's calculated by dividing the total number of citations received by all papers in the group (defined by research field and publication year) by the total number of papers in the group. The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in the last year to articles published in the previous two years. [12] To reach the top-100 papers required 12,119 citations by 2014. Elsevier's Field-Weighted Citation Impact . Google Scholar. A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field. Not to be confused with. We found that there a significant correlation between the values for individual researchers. Galvez, R. H. (2017). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102. PLoS Biol. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. NSB, 2020, p. V-12, Fig. These novel findings demonstrate that Covid-19 papers are being cited at remarkably higher rates than non-Covid-19 articles contained within the same journals. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.