Abstract
Ecologists writing research articles frequently cite their own papers. Self-citations are frequent in science, but the reasons behind abnormally high rates of self-citations are questionable. My goals were to assess the prevalence of author self-citations and to identify the combination of attributes that best predict high levels of self-citations in ecology articles. I searched 643 articles from 9 different ecology journals of various impact factors for synchronous (i.e., within reference lists) and diachronous (i.e., following publication) self-citations, using the Web of Science online database. I assessed the effect of the number of authors, pages, and references/citations, the proportion of diachronous/synchronous self-citations, and the impact factor, on the proportion of synchronous and diachronous self-citations separately. I compared various candidate models made of these covariates using Akaike’s Information Criterion. On average, ecologists made 6.0 synchronous self-citations (12.8% of references), and 2.5 diachronous self-citations (25.5% of citations received 2.8 to 4.5 years after publication) per article. The best predictor of the proportion of synchronous self-citations was the number of authors. My study is the first to report recidivism in the inclusion of self-citations by researchers, i.e., the proportion of diachronous self-citations was best explained by the proportion of synchronous self-citations. The proportion of self-citations also increased with the number of pages and the impact factor of ecology journals, and decreased with the number of references/citations. Although a lot of variance remained unexplained, my study successfully showed regularities in the propensity of ecologists to include self-citations in their research articles.
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Notes
E.g., the impact factor of a journal in 2006 is the number of times articles published by the journal in 2004–2005 were cited in indexed journals in 2006, divided by the number of articles published by the journal in 2004–2005.
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Leblond, M. Author self-citations in the field of ecology. Scientometrics 91, 943–953 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0565-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0565-9