Scientometrics,54(2), 285290. It is evident that the modal self-reference share is around 57% and the modal self-citation count is less than 5%, but this will be shown to vary by field. The dataset used for this analysis was the Web of Science list of Highly Cited Researchers for 2019. A., Bresciani, K., Ramos, T., De Matos, L., Castellane, P., & Cerdeira, M. (2015). The difference between research influence and self-citation excess. (608) 262-2020 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016632. More recently, advanced models for a dynamic analysis of citation aging have been proposed. Typically, the citation rate of papers published in the last three years They are not statistical tests but point to rather than definitively identifying possible cases of excessive self-citation. Highly cited papers are defined for this purpose as those in the top 1% by citations in their ESI field and for their year of publication. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science,23(2), 2546. Example: An article published in October 2017 has been cited 8 times in 2017, 5 times in 2018, 5 times in 2019, 5 times in 2020, and 15 times in 2021. Davis, P. M. (2009). The 2020 Journal Impact Factors, published in the 2021 Journal Citation Report, are based on citations in 2020 to articles published in 2018 and 2019. Other companies report similar metrics, such as the CiteScore (CS), based on Scopus. a field, but the margin of difference is impossible to determine. 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. Publish or Perish, Commercial versus Open Access, Internet versus Libraries? Even with a graphical test, analytical identification of outliers is only the first step in assessing the data as a reliable indicator of community-wide influence or not. Individual author data-points appear as outliers, discontinuous with the central range, which lie beyond the calculated test thresholds. 5a, b). Moravcsik, M. J., & Murugesan, P. (1975). The list is intended to identify scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant community influence through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade. Moreover, studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank",[14] contrary to widespread expectations. "[61][62], According to Mario Biagioli: "All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Establishing Your Author Name and Presence. In 2021, Frontiers articles were viewed and downloaded 515 million times, totalling 1.5 billion overall. Niyazov, Y., Vogel, C., Price, R., Lund, B., Judd, D., Akil, A., & Shron, M. (2016). https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999%3c:AID-ASI1542%3e3.0.CO;2-T. Wilhite, A. W., & Fong, E. A. Evidence of complex citer motivations. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2014.11.008. Average citations increased from 3.9 in 2019 to 4.8 in 2020 for every article published with us. (2016). [11] By 2014 it had accumulated more than 305,000 citations. However, their citation records are substantial enough not to be affected by small variations and they should be broadly representative of peer expectations about standards and good practice in publication and citation behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-006-0006-3. Note Citation counts for a year are the number of citations in the peer-reviewed literature for articles published in that year. Citation analysis: Queries and caveats. Patterns of self-citation across disciplines (19801989). Self-citations are somewhat lower than many fields but self-referencing is extremely low and often zero. Data covers a rolling 10-year period and includes bimonthly updates to rankings and citation counts. Publications, 8(2), 17. an assay to measure the concentration of proteins, "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas", "Citation Frequency as a Measure of Research Activity and Performance", "Can Researchers Bank on Citation Analysis? Other journal-level metrics include the Eigenfactor, and the SCImago Journal Rank. These data are also summarised in the Appendix Table2. Inclusion of these would undoubtedly have increased the volume of papers and affected the results, though the direction or magnitude of change is unclear. The disciplines chosen were respiratory, cardiology, immunology, radiology, microbiology, gastroenterology and hepatology, general and internal medicine, and multidisciplinary sciences. Snyder, H., & Bonzi, S. (1998). https://doi.org/10.1556/650.2016.30443. 2019; Shehatta and Al-Rubaish 2019). eLIFE, 8, article number e45374. COVID-19 citation pandemic within the psychological knowledge domain The field or subject area: t: Year: d: Document Type: n: The number of subjects to which a paper is assigned: i: . A generalized view of self-citation: Direct, co-author, collaborative, and coercive induced self-citation. For months after, cases and fatalities rose at staggering clips as governing bodies worldwide grappled with the best measures to contain the virus. 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 Journal Normalized Citation Impact of a single publication is the ratio of the actual number of citing items to the average citation rate of publications in the same journal in the same year and with the same document type . Consequently, citation rates should not be interpreted as representing the central tendency of the distribution. Yu, T., Yu, G., & Wang, M. Y. 129-144). In W. Glnzel, H. F. Moed, U. Schmoch, & M. Thelwall (Eds. In doing this, we demonstrate the sharp contrast between citation rates for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles published in 24 months during the rise and height of the global pandemic. (2018). (2004a). In every field-based profile, some researcher portfolios are on a steeper part of the curve with values above but continuous with the central range. Physics (194 Highly Cited Researchers) is a similar sized field to Engineering to which its research culture might also be linked. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0745-2. 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]). Schubert, A. Article American Documentation,16(3), 179184. [24], An alternative approach to measure a scholar's impact relies on usage data, such as number of downloads from publishers and analyzing citation performance, often at article level. This means that other publications such as letters, editorials, perspectives, and opinions were not included in our search criteria which leaves a large number of publications out of the study. Fong, E. A. Gianoli, E., & Molina-Montenegro, M. A. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810844150. Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. A baseline is the average performance of a global set of publications with the same subject area, document type and year. Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact", "Measuring Up: Impact Factors Do Not Reflect Article Citation Rates", "Ditching Impact Factors for Deeper Data", "The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies", "Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals", "Citation Advantage of Open Access Articles", "Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How It Increases Research Citation Impact", "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research", "Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial", "The impact factor of an open access journal does not contribute to an article's citations", "Universality of citation distributions: Toward an objective measure of scientific impact", "Scholarometer: A Social Framework for Analyzing Impact across Disciplines", "What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation", 20.500.11755/2fd7fc12-1766-4ddd-8f19-1d2603d2e11d, "Evaluation by Citation: Trends in Publication Behavior, Evaluation Criteria, and the Strive for High Impact Publications", "Psychology and Wikipedia: Measuring Psychology Journals' Impact by Wikipedia Citations", "Psychology and Wikipedia: Measuring journals' impact by Wikipedia citations", "Research Quality, Publications and Impact in Civil Engineering into the 21st Century. This was particularly true among the outliers, in other words: researchers who self-reference at unusually high rates (above the central range) are also authors on papers where an unusually high proportion of the citations received are self-citations. 2016; King et al. (2004). But, in practice, a visual inspection of the full profile for the data set is required to complete a valid interpretation. Though our method of locating Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 papers in the selected journals was more expedient, manual scouring of the journals themselves over the 24 months would have optimized both the sensitivity and specificity of locating and comparing the most comprehensive list of publications possible. https://doi.org/10.1556/Scient.67.2006.2.8. van Raan, A. F. J. Self-citation by researchers: Narcissism or an inevitable outcome of a cohesive and sustained research program? The wider implication is that, despite the general and widespread pattern of self-cites across field profiles, care will always be required to interpret the particular statistics of any field-limited sample. Temporal differences in self-citation rates of scientific journals. 2019; Kacem et al. For instance, most papers in Nature (impact factor 38.1, 2016) were only cited 10 or 20 times during the reference year (see figure). (2012). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1212540. Most notably, its categorization of a publication as Article seems imperfect. Field normalized citation metrics are used to attempt to contextualize the citation rate of an article to the expected citation rate of other articles of the same field, publication type, and publication year. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,40(5), 342349. https://doi.org/10.22452/mjlis.vol22no1.1. A bibliometric approach to the role of author self-citations in scientific communication. A higher rate of self-citation is expected for co-author than for strict author self-citation, and, in general, a rising rate of co-author self-citation is observed with the growth in average number of authors per paper over time (van Raan 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel and Thijs 2004b). Typically, the citation rate of papers published in the last three years are below the citation rate for all years. The citation rate for all years is the total number of citations JIF is a commonly used surrogate to determine journal excellence and is calculated by dividing number of citations in the current year for articles published in the previous two years by total number of articles published in that journal during the previous two years [21]. Simoes, N., & Crespo, N. (2020). Fields are ranked by median self-citation rate. 2015; Bakare and Lewison 2017; Bornmann et al. MathSciNet In-text function of author self-citations: Implications for research evaluation practice. Cooke, S. J., & Donaldson, M. R. (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-008-9055-y. However, the use of non-article-level metrics to determine the impact of a single article is statistically invalid. Using information provided in Clarivate's 2020 Journal Citation Reports [] published on June 30, 2021, the top three journals by impact factor were selected from eight scientific categories as defined by WOS.Disciplines were selected based on the likelihood of having high relevancy to Covid-19 and, therefore, a sufficient volume of Covid-19-related papers in that field . 2, are collated in the Appendix ( Figs. The Scopus web site claims this database is the "largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research." The median (M=Q2) and lower (Q1) and upper (Q3) quartile values for percentage self-citation rate among Highly Cited Researchers were calculated for each ESI field. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,52(2), 87108. For instance, many more scientists work in neuroscience than in mathematics, and neuroscientists publish more papers than mathematicians, hence neuroscience papers are much more often cited than papers in mathematics. Scientometrics,73(3), 321330. & Wilhite, A. W. (2017). 267278). Elsevier's Field-Weighted Citation Impact . Citation Analysis - Measuring Your Impact: Impact Factor, Citation Ideas in Ecology and Evaluation,7(1), 12. Larivive, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. Amidst all of this, there has been an explosion of peer-reviewed literature about Covid-19 as researchers work to uncover details such as structure, infectivity, spread, effects, prevention, and treatment of this novel virus. The following chart shows the differences between Citation Impact of various subject categories. Endometrial cancer: mapping the global landscape of research For this exercise, ISI always uses full author counts rather than any variant form of fractional counting because the issue is a binary question of whether or not an author has self-cited. 2006; Thijs and Glnzel 2006; Schubert et al. Citation indexing: Its theory and application in science, technology, and humanities. Cities With the Highest Price-to-Rent Ratios: Where Renting Is More Favorable Than Buying. Keep in mind that citation rates are calculated from citation counts of papers that meet the criteria for inclusion in ESI. Part of Springer Nature. Bjrk, B. C., Kanto-Karvonen, S., & Harviainen, J. T. (2020). Additionally, citation rate for Covid-19 papers has been assessed previously without direct comparison to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals [20]. The expected citation rate of articles in its co-citation network published in the same year is 6 citations per year. The AWCR is very useful, but it only works if publishers enter the dates of their online materials correctly. Disciplines were selected based on the likelihood of having high relevancy to Covid-19 and, therefore, a sufficient volume of Covid-19-related papers in that fields premier journals. 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Motivations for citations: A comparison of self-citation and citation to others. will be below the citation rate for all years. (1986). 2018; Zhao and Strotmann 2018; Ioannidis et al. Relevant data are summarised for reference in Appendix Tables2 and 3. These results are similar to where the pay gap stood in 2002, when women earned 80% as much as men. Additionally, articles less than 2 years old with less than 5 citations will not have an RCR (e.g., an article published in 2021 will not receive an RCR in 2022 unless it has 5 or more citations). 2019; Seeber et al. dividing the total number of citations received by all papers in the group between 2008 and the present. The skewness and Kurtosis tests were used for testing the normal distribution of continuous variables. The combination of a long bibliography of papers published in obscure journals and an abnormally high self-citation count would make the intent so obvious that the technique would be self-defeating (Garfield 1979). ISBN-13: 978-3527337040. Bornmann, L., Adams, J., & Leydesdorff, L. (2018). Welcome to the Next Generation Essential Science Indicators. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.002. In other words, self-citations are implicitly woven in the fabric of scientific and scholarly publishing and communication and, in that sense, their influence cannot be excised from the citation record. American Sociological Review,22(6), 635659. Note, in this paper, that we refer to self-references and to self-cites and that they are not the same thing. Social Studies of Science,44(4), 625637. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1777-2. A note on self-citation rates in astronomical papers. An average for the full 10-year period is also given in All Years. David F. Kallmes, Toward the more effective identification of journals with anomalous self-citation. Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. 237280). PsycINFO offers a Cited Reference tool that allows for location of cited works indexed in PsycINFO. The gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the United States over the past 20 years or so. Individual, country, and journal self-citation in soil science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The practice of self-citations: a longitudinal study. [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.