Trends in self-citation rates in Neuroscience literature (original) (raw)
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Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender
PLOS ONE
It was recently reported that men self-cite >50% more often than women across a wide variety of disciplines in the bibliographic database JSTOR. Here, we replicate this finding in a sample of 1.6 million papers from Authority , a version of PubMed with computationally disambiguated author names. More importantly, we show that the gender effect largely disappears when accounting for prior publication count in a multidimensional statistical model. Gender has the weakest effect on the probability of self-citation among an extensive set of features tested, including byline position, affiliation, ethnicity, collaboration size, time lag, subject-matter novelty, reference/citation counts, publication type, language, and venue. We find that self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender, who cite their novel journal publications early and in similar venues, and more often cross citation-barriers such as language and indexing. As a result, papers by authors with short, disrupted, or diverse careers miss out on the initial boost in visibility gained from self-citations. Our data further suggest that this disproportionately affects women because of attrition and not because of disciplinary under-specialization.
Men set their own cites high: Gender and self-citation across fields and over time
How common is self-citation in scholarly publication and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a dataset of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779-2011, we find that nearly 10% of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. We further find that over the years between 1779-2011, men cite their own papers 56% more than women do. In the last two decades of our data, men self-cite 70% more than women. Women are also more than ten percentage points more likely than men to not cite their own previous work at all. Despite increased representation of women in academia, this gender gap in self-citation rates has remained stable over the last 50 years. We break down self-citation patterns by academic field and number of authors, and comment on potential mechanisms behind these observations. These findings have important implications for scholarly visibility and likely consequences for academic careers. Copyright 2016. King, Bergstrom, Correll, Jacquet and West. All rights reserved. This paper is for the reader's personal use only. Adamson 2004). Among doctoral scientists and engineers at four year institutions in 2013, 28% of tenured faculty were women, compared to 42% on the tenure track and 46% who were not in tenure track positions (NSF 2013). Women are also underrepresented as faculty in the most elite universities (NSF 2015c; Weisshaar n.d.). Controlling for numbers of papers authored as well as other institutional factors, women assistant professors are still less likely their men counterparts to receive tenure (Weisshaar n.d.). At institutions offering tenure in 2011-2012, 54% of men but only 41% of women full-time instructional faculty had tenure (NCES 2013). These status differences translate to real-world economic outcomes. Most studies show that women faculty earn less than men faculty (reviewed in Bentley and Adamson 2004). In the 2012-2013 academic year, men faculty earned about 22% more than women faculty at degreegranting two-and four-year institutions (average salary: 84,000versus84,000 versus 84,000versus69,100) (NCES Copyright 2016. King, Bergstrom, Correll, Jacquet and West. All rights reserved. This paper is for the reader's personal use only. 4 2013).
Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: effects of different calculation methods
Scientometrics, 2010
This paper focuses on the study of self-citations at the meso and micro (individual) levels, on the basis of an analysis of the production (1994–2004) of individual researchers working at the Spanish CSIC in the areas of Biology and Biomedicine and Material Sciences. Two different types of self-citations are described: author self-citations (citations received from the author him/herself) and co-author self-citations (citations received from the researchers’ co-authors but without his/her participation). Self-citations do not play a decisive role in the high citation scores of documents either at the individual or at the meso level, which are mainly due to external citations. At micro-level, the percentage of self-citations does not change by professional rank or age, but differences in the relative weight of author and co-author self-citations have been found. The percentage of co-author self-citations tends to decrease with age and professional rank while the percentage of author self-citations shows the opposite trend. Suppressing author self-citations from citation counts to prevent overblown self-citation practices may result in a higher reduction of citation numbers of old scientists and, particularly, of those in the highest categories. Author and co-author self-citations provide valuable information on the scientific communication process, but external citations are the most relevant for evaluative purposes. As a final recommendation, studies considering self-citations at the individual level should make clear whether author or total self-citations are used as these can affect researchers differently.
Research production in high-impact journals of contemporary neuroscience: A gender analysis
Journal of Informetrics, 2017
Neuroscience or Neural Science is a very active and interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the brain and the nervous system. In spite of important advances made in recent decades, women are still underrepresented in neuroscience research output as a consequence of gender inequality in science overall. This study carries out a scientometric analysis of the 30 neuroscience journals (2009-2010) with the highest impact in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters) in order to quantitatively examine the current contribution of women in neuroscientific production, their pattern of research collaboration, scientific content, and the analysis of scientific impact from a gender perspective. From a total of 66,937 authorships, gender could be identified in 53,351 (79.7%) of them. Results revealed that 67.1% of the authorships corresponded to men and 32.9% to women. In relative terms, women tend to be concentrated in the first position of the authorship by-line (which could be a reflection of new female incorporations into neuroscience research publishing their first studies), and much less in the last (senior) position. This double pattern suggests that age probably plays a role in (partly) explaining gender asymmetry, both in science in general and in neuroscience in particular.
Changing patterns of self-citation: Cumulative inquiry or self-promotion?
Text and Talk, 2018
Self-citations are a familiar, if sometimes controversial, element of academic knowledge construction and reputation-building, contributing to both the cumulative nature of academic re-search and helping writers to promote their scientific authority and enhance their careers. As scholarly publications become more specialised, more collaborative and more important for promotion and tenure, we might expect self-citation to play a more visible role in published research and this paper explores this possibility. Here we trace patterns of self-citation in papers from the same five journals in four disciplines at three-time periods over the past 50 years, selected according to their impact ranking in 2015. We identify a large increase in self-citations although this is subject to disciplinary variation and tempered by a huge rise in citations overall, so that self-citation has fallen as a proportion of all citations. We attempt to ac-count for these changes and give a rhetorical explanation for authorial practices.
The practice of self-citations: a longitudinal study
Scientometrics
In this article, we discuss the outcomes of an experiment where we analysed whether and to what extent the introduction, in 2012, of the new research assessment exercise in Italy (a.k.a. Italian Scientific Habilitation) affected self-citation behaviours in the Italian research community. The Italian Scientific Habilitation attests to the scientific maturity of researchers and in Italy, as in many other countries, is a requirement for accessing to a professorship. To this end, we obtained from ScienceDirect 35,673 articles published from 1957 and 2016 by the participants to the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation, that resulted in the extraction of 1,379,050 citations retrieved through Semantic Publishing technologies. Our analysis showed an overall increment in author self-citations (i.e. where the citing article and the cited article share at least one author) in several of the 24 academic disciplines considered. However, we depicted a stronger causal relation between such increment and the rules introduced by the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation in 10 out of 24 disciplines analysed.
Scientometrics, 2006
The objective of the present study is twofold: (1) to show the aims and means of quantitative interpretation of bibliographic features in bibliometrics and their re-interpretation in research policy, and (2) to summarise the state-of-art in self-citation research. The authors describe three approaches to the role of author self-citations and possible conflicts arising from the different perspectives. From the bibliometric viewpoint we can conclude that that there is no reason for condemning self-citations in general or for removing them from macro or meso statistics; supplementary indicators based on self-citations are, nonetheless, useful to understand communication patterns.
Galen Medical Journal, 2021
Background: Author and journal self-citation contributes to the overall citation count of an article and the impact factor (IF) of the journal in which it appears. However, little is known about the extent of self-citation in the general clinical medicine literature. This study aimed to determine the effect of self-citation (journal and author) on the IF of Iranian, American, and European English medical journals. Materials and Methods: IF, IF without self-citations (corrected IF), journal self-citation rate, and author self-citation rate for medical journals were investigated from 2014-2021 by reviewing the Journal Citation Report (JCR). Twenty Iranian medical journals (published in English) in the web of science indexed were selected and compared with 20 American and 20 European medical journals. The correlation between the journal self-citation and author self-citation with IF was obtained. We used Spearman's correlation coefficient for the correlation of self-citation and IF. Results: The overall journal citations were higher in the American and European journals compared to the Iranian ones between 2014 and 2021. There was a significant relationship between journal self-citation rates and IF (P<0.001). The findings demonstrated that the rate of author self-citation was higher in the European and American journals compared to the Iranian ones. Findings also showed a significant difference between the author's self-citation and IF in Iranian, American, and European medical journals that published in English (P<0.001). Conclusions: The self-citation rate positively affects the IF in medical journals. A high concentration of self-citation of some journals could distort the ranking among medical surgery journals in general.
Scientific impact of an author and role of self-citations
Scientometrics
In bibliometric and scientometric research, the quantitative assessment of scientific impact has boomed over the past few decades. Citations, being playing a major role in enhancing the impact of researchers, have become a very significant part of a plethora of new techniques for measuring scientific impact. Self-citations, though can be used genuinely to credit someone's own work, can play a significant role in artificial manipulation of scientific impact. In this research, we study the impact of self-citations on enhancing the scientific impact of an author using a dataset retrieved from AMiner ranging from 1936 to 2014 from the computer science domain. We investigated the relations among trends of selfcitation and their influence on scientific impact. We also studied its influence on ranking metrics including author impact factor and H-Index. By analyzing self-citations over time, we discover five basic self-citation trends, which are early, middle, later, multi and none. Distinctly different patterns were observed in self-citations trends. The results show that self-citations, if totally removed from total received citations, negatively influence the AIF and H-Index values and hence can be used to artificially boost the scientific impact. We used regression-based prediction models to predict the influence of self-citations on future H-Index. Classifiers including Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes and K-NN were used with an accuracy of 93%, 73% and 60% respectively.
Neurosurgery, 2015
BACKGROUND: The citation climate in neurosurgical literature is largely undefined. OBJECTIVE: To study the patterns of citation of articles in neurosurgery as a scientific field and to evaluate the performance of neurosurgery journals vis-à-vis journals in other fields. METHODS: References cited in articles published in neurosurgery journals during a specified time period were analyzed to determine the age of articles cited in neurosurgical literature. In the next analysis, articles published in neurosurgical journals were followed up for 13 years after publication. The postpublication citation patterns were analyzed to determine the time taken to reach the maximally cited state and the time when articles stopped being cited. The final part of the study dealt with the evolution of a new interfield citation metric, which was then compared with other standardized citation indexes. RESULTS: The mean 6 SD age of articles cited in neurosurgical literature was 11.6 6 11.7 years (median, 8 years). Citations received by articles gradually increased to a peak (at 6.25 years after publication in neurosurgery) and then reached a steady state; articles were still cited well into the late postpublication period. Neurosurgical articles published in nonneurosurgical high-impact journals were cited more highly than those in neurosurgical journals, although they took approximately the same time to reach the maximally cited state (7.2 years). The most cited pure neurosurgery journal was Neurosurgery. CONCLUSION: The citation climate for neurosurgery was adequately described. The interfield citation metric was able to ensure cross-field comparability of journal performance.