(2006). [16] The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. We will show below that the range of self-citation rates among Highly Cited Researchers follows a negative binomial distribution (NBD). Annalen der Physik,18(9), 607621. (2016). 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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384. The quantitative aspect may not be associated with quality of the publications. Another limitation of this study is that open-access versus subscription-based journals were not filtered separately during the WOS search. a 10-year period. 844851. To establish a comparison that was more evenly matched in terms of article volume, randomization software on Microsoft Excel was used to select a sample of non-Covid-19 papers from each journal to create a 1:1 comparison of citation rates between non-Covid and Covid papers. At least 2 years of . 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 . Institutional self-citation rates: A three-year study of universities in the United States. (1983). By the end of January, more than 50 research papers had been published about the outbreak [2]. reported that on average, delayed OAJs had citation rates twice as high as TAJs, and 3 times as high as immediate OAJs [9]. Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & Bordons, M. (2010). A citation rate is the average number of citations received by a group of papers published in one research field in a given year. Disentangling Gold Open Access. The reasons for this require expert, informed interpretation but the degree to which this category may capture a series of small, isolated fields has been noted previously (Bensman et al. These rates of self-citation are evidently much lower than those of self-referencing, as expected for Highly Cited Researchers because their broad peer influence attracts many cites from others (van Raan 2008), and they are relatively more variable between fields compared to self-referencing. 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). https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999%3c:AID-ASI1542%3e3.0.CO;2-T. Wilhite, A. W., & Fong, E. A. Cham: Springer. A younger person with few publications would not generally exhibit high rates of self-citation. The disciplines chosen were respiratory, cardiology, immunology, radiology, microbiology, gastroenterology and hepatology, general and internal medicine, and multidisciplinary sciences. We emphasize the labelling we use for these two because there is potential confusion in the terms self citing and self cited, which have been used elsewhere. The CiteScore journal impact metric measures the average citations received in a four-year time window to selected documents published in the same four years. If you score a 1060, that means you're slightly above the 50th percentile: about half of the people taking the test scored higher than you and half scored lower. Authors as citers over time. Manipulation of explicit reputation in innovation and knowledge exchange communities: The example of referencing in science. The publication portfolio of each of the initially selected Highly Cited Researchers in each ESI field is examined to determine how often on average their highly cited papers: are cited by later papers on which they also appear as an author (Self-Citing, which reveals whether Highly Cited Researcher status is driven by self-citation rather than wider peer influence); are citing earlier papers on which they also appear as an author (Self-Referencing, which reveals whether Highly Cited Researchers draw on their own research as distinct from a wider research network). In our study, we use Clarivates Web of ScienceScience Citation Index Expanded database to identify Covid-19 papers published in 24 major scientific journals over a period of 24 months from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021. Mathematics has a lower Citation https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2490-z. 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. The first example of automated citation indexing was CiteSeer, later to be followed by Google Scholar. Journal of Documentation,64(1), 4580. The rhetoric-first model. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2013.11.001. Sugimoto, C. R., & Larivire, V. (2018). Linear plots by Essential Science Indicators field of the pattern of self-referencing to earlier papers by Highly Cited Researchers identified by analysing Web of Science data for 20082018 and to (self-citing from later publications) highly cited papers on which a researcher is also an author or co-author. PLoS ONE, 12(12), article number e0187394. Using a negative regression model to analyze the entire data, Covid-19 papers have 84% more citations than non-Covid-19 papers when controlling for field and article number discrepancies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,61(7), 15141515. 2015). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0187394. Kim, S. Y., & Kim, Y. 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. 2015; Galvez 2017; Hyland and Jiang 2018; Mishra et al. The following excerpt from a Citation Rates 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0523-6. Scientometrics,87(1), 8598. In response, the scientific field has dedicated enormous amounts of resources to researching the virus and its effects. Merton, R. K. (1942). Do citations provide a full narrative of meaningful health outcomes? PLOS ONE, impact factor 3.1) publish many papers that are cited 0 to 5 times but few highly cited articles. The time period for citation counts is 10 years, plus partial year counts for the current year (data is updated six times a year). Open access increases citations of papers in ecology. 8,835 of these papers received a number of citations that placed them in the top 1% of all Engineering papers in the past 10 years. 2 was repeated with the other ESI fields. A percentile defines a fraction or subset of papers in a research field that received a minimum number of citations. 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. 2010; Bartneck and Kokkelmans 2011; Huang and Lin 2011; Ferrara and Romero 2013; Viiu 2016). Trends in Ecology & Evolution,23(5), 250252. 2006; Glnzel 2008; van Raan 2008; Hyland and Jiang 2018; Mishra et al. [12] To reach the top-100 papers required 12,119 citations by 2014. In 1979, Eugene Garfield noted: Theoretically, self-citations are a way of manipulating citation rates. Goodhart's law [] states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it. Journal of Higher Education,81(3), 366393. Scientometrics,109(3), 19892005. 2), Log plots by Essential Science Indicators field of the pattern of self-referencing to earlier papers by Highly Cited Researchers identified by analysing Web of Science data for 20082018 and to (self-citing from later publications) highly cited papers on which a researcher is also an author or co-author. 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. A single average citation rate was obtained from this smaller sample as well. New factors in the evaluation of scientific literature through citation indexing. Cooke, S. J., & Donaldson, M. R. (2014). 750 Highland Ave, Madison, WI 53705-2221 2010; Leblond 2012; Lin and Huang 2012; Cooke and Donaldson 2014; Ioannidis 2015;Soares et al. These "tweetations" proved to be a good indicator of highly cited articles, leading the author to propose a "Twimpact factor", which is the number of Tweets it receives in the first seven days of publication, as well as a Twindex, which is the rank percentile of an article's Twimpact factor. Research suggests the impact of an article can be, partly, explained by superficial factors and not only by the scientific merits of an article. Data displayed are the average percentage of citations from (self-referencing to earlier papers) and to (self-citing from later publications) highly cited papers on which a researcher is also an author or co-author. It is important to recognize that citation counts grow over Scientometrics,66(1), 7180. We anticipate that JIFs will be affected in coming years which could change the landscape for how journal excellence is determined in the future. Scopus is considered by many to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis and journal ranking statistics.. Discover a faster, simpler path to publishing in a high-quality journal. Narin (1976) saw another possible method for manipulating the citation record: If citation analysis becomes an accepted, universal method of evaluating research utilization, scientists may conspire with their colleagues to cite one another to effect an increase in their individual citation counts. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Self-citations in scientific literature. We found that there a significant correlation between the values for individual researchers. The Percentiles Table displays levels of citation activity. Andersen, J. P., Schneider, J. W., Jagsi, R. & Nielsen, M. W. (2019). The fourth age of research. Are citations indicative or predictive of translational or clinical applications? Because of the skew in such a distribution, an issue arises concerning the application of standard tests for data outliers. Google Scholar. Lin, W. Y. C., & Huang, M. H. (2012). 2019; Simoes and Crespo 2020). 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. 2019), although not all agree with this finding (DAntuono and Ciavarella 2019). (2013). 2019). The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(198601)37:1%3c34:AID-ASI5%3e3.0.CO;2-0. [47] Two reasons for this are that many of the top-cited journals today are still only hybrid OA (author has the option to pay for gold)[48] and many pure author-pays OA journals today are either of low quality or downright fraudulent "predatory journals," preying on authors' eagerness to publish-or-perish, thereby lowering the average citation counts of OA journals.[49]. 2018; Baccini et al. Mishra, S., Fegley, B. D., Diesner, J., & Torvik, V. I. The self-citation pattern is different to other sciences and rates appear generally to be higher. Ioannidis, J. P. A., Baas, J., Klavans, R., & Boyack, K. W. (2019). ESI is a compilation of science performance statistics and science trends data using data from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science. We first need to add up the number of citations the article has received the year it was published and the 3 calendar years following its publication (i.e., 2017 to the end of December, 2020). Today, both excessive self-citation and citation cartels are real concerns and have been documented (Ioannidis 2015; Fister et al. 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). (Eds.). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1212540. Median and range were used to represent continuous variables (not normally distributed) while we used frequencies and percentages to represent categorical variables. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, article number UNSP e13151. American Sociological Review,22(6), 635659. Patterns of self-citation across disciplines (19801989). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2016.02.007. This would seemingly be an impactful factor in how often these articles are being cited. Jonathan Adams. An early estimate was 8%, based on first author to first author self-citation and modest data availability (Garfield and Sher 1963). However, very high JIF or CS are often based on a small number of very highly cited papers. A users guide to inflated and manipulated impact factors. 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. 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. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23302. The Citation Tracker feature also allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart and for removal of self-citations from the overall citation counts. As with all bibliometric indicators, field variation is significant, so much depends on field definition and the alignment of individuals and their work. papers that meet the criteria for inclusion in Essential Science Indicators. Given the refereeing system that controls the quality of the scientific literature in the better known journals, the high publication count could be achieved only if the person had a lot to say that was at least marginally significant. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017571. That is to say: a test threshold value is set above the third quartile (Q3) boundary equivalent to N times the inter-quartile range (Q3Q1). The nature of research in a field, its level of fractionation, typical citation densities and potentials: all these and more contribute to what may be an expected rate of self-citation for a field or an individual. The Highly Cited Researchers review procedure has the goal of identifying community-wide influence and its focus is the extent of self-citing rather than self-referencing, but both are examined for each putative selectee. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02948. The authors are employees of the Institute for Scientific Information, which is a part of Clarivate Analytics, the owners of the Web of Science Group. Field normalized citation metrics are an article level metric. PLoS Biol. 2018; Baccini et al. Harnad, S. (2009). Journal of Education and Social Policy,2, 7579. The Frontiers Neuroscience journal series includes all Frontiers journals in the field of Neuroscience. 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The field or subject area: t: Year: d: Document Type: n: The number of subjects to which a paper is assigned: i: . In 2017 and 2018, 20.8% of PLOS publications and 12.2% of BMC publications provided DAS containing a link to data in a repository. [55] For instance in Medicine among other factors the number of authors, the number of references, the article length, and the presence of a colon in the title influence the impact. The linear thresholds were therefore plotted on the log-plots rather than calculating a log-normal value which would have been very inclusive with few indicative outliers. Clinical medicine is the largest field (448 Highly Cited Researchers). The weight of author self-citations. Biagioli, M., Kenney, M., Martin, B. R., & Walsh, J. P. (2019). Is collaboration among scientists related to the citation impact of papers because their quality increases with collaboration? The citation rate for all years is the total number of citations received by all papers in all fields published during the 10-year period divided by the total number of papers. [13], Journal-level metrics are often misinterpreted as a measure for journal quality or article quality. [22] Counting the number of citations per paper is also employed to identify the authors of citation classics. Citation rates are heavily dependent on the discipline and the number of people working in that area. Moravcsik, M. J., & Murugesan, P. (1975). Google Scholar. This would mean that the article is being cited an average of 50% more times per year than expected for articles within its co-citation network published in the same 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. Anderson, M. S., Ronning, E. A., DeVries, R., & Martinson, B. C. (2010). You can find an article's field normalized citation metrics in either iCite or Scopus. This term is used to denote any fixed fraction of top papers ordered by citation count. The problem will arise if cronyism occurs only in isolated instances. 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. For the scope of this paper, we used papers categorized as Article or Review in our WOS search to ensure that we were focusing on original works and evidence-based literature. Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2018). Correspondence to Profesional de la Informacin,27(2), 241253. 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. Frandsen, T. F. (2007). The patterns of self-citation rates suggest a very broad cultural consensus about the balance between building on ones own work and recognising the influence of others. It is said that one persons outlier may be, for an NBD, simply an extreme part of the skew. These data are also summarised in the Appendix Table2. We found that the WOS database included 76% of the Covid-19 papers contained within the journals themselves. 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: According to the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (WOS), which includes more than 8,300 journals across 150 scientific disciplines, nearly 200,000 Covid-19 related papers were published or presented in 24 months between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 [5]. The smaller sets had too few articles to analyze, however, so the final number of field/year combinations analyzed was slightly less. The concept of self-citation (self-referencing or self-citation) can also be defined narrowly or broadly, that is, including or not including coauthors (Snyder and Bonzi 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel et al. 2010; Carley et al. A., Bresciani, K., Ramos, T., De Matos, L., Castellane, P., & Cerdeira, M. (2015). We compare these rates with citation rates for non-Covid-19 articles published in the same 24 journals over an identical time frame. Social Studies of Science,44(4), 625637. 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 . A FWCI of 1 is considered average, while a FWCI of greater than 1 is above average. For an overview of FWCIs and how they're calculated, see: For a quick overview of field weighted citation impact metrics (which includes FWCI), see: Ebling Library, Health Sciences Learning Center Merton later included humility in one description of the norms of scientific research (Merton 1957). This analysis, like others before, has been about individual self-citation by researchers. https://doi.org/10.2307/2580486. (608) 262-2020 Space Science has an exceptional level of self-referencing, which is presumably also a consequence of the nature of research in that area. Gianoli, E., & Molina-Montenegro, M. A. We describe both a generic level of median self-referencing rates, common to most fields, and a graphical, distribution-driven assessment of excessive self-citation that demarcates a threshold not dependent on statistical tests or percentiles (since for some fields all values are within a central normal range). 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]). It is important to recognize that citation counts grow over time. A generalized view of self-citation: Direct, co-author, collaborative, and coercive induced self-citation. Data are plotted both as a linear and as a log-normal plot. Scientometrics,93(3), 745750. Any paper published in the 10-year period may be cited by any other paper published during the same period. ESI provides Field Baseline tables based on specific research fields for citation analysis: Citation Rates and Percentiles. (2018). This final point is important because it changes our focus for the future. 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. Scientometrics,59(3), 281310. & Wilhite, A. W. (2017). The larger the minimum number of citations, the smaller the peer group. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0565-9. That figure is close to the findings of many other researchers in the following five decades. All articles published within the 24-month time frame were selected to produce an average citation rate for the journal itself over that period. Social crowdsourcing tools such as Scholarometer have been proposed to address this need. (2013). Informed judgment is, as elsewhere in good research management, an essential step in valid decision-making. The journal impact factor, the two-year average ratio of citations to articles published, is a measure of the importance of journals. [30], In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, Universit de Montral, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science proposed citation distributions metrics as alternative to impact factors. We also thank an anonymous referee for their comments regarding the typicality of highly-cited researchers. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. MathSciNet Fields that lie outside the main distribution (Pharmacology, Mathematics and Space Science) have been labelled. PLOS ONE, 11(2), e0148257. Schreiber, M. (2007). Humility, noted Merton, serves to reduce the misbehavior of scientists below the rate that would occur if importance were assigned only to originality and the establishing of priority (Merton 1957). Ferrara, E., & Romero, A. E. (2013). Cumulative advantage and the symbolism of intellectual property. The negative binomial regression model was selected over a linear regression model because it resulted in a better fit to the data and was more appropriate for count data. 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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.01.002. Robert J. McDonald, `Amongst all fields, only articles categorized as Medicine, General, or Internal according to WOS see a bump (28%) in citation rates that can be attributed to the field itself. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363. 5a, b compares the calculated low outlier threshold (i.e. 2018; Scarpa et al. Baselines are calculated using a whole counting method, this means that all papers in a subject area are counted towards the baseline calculation regardless of whether those papers are also in other subject areas or not. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2330-1. The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of citations received in the last year to articles published in the previous two years. affiliations represented by the authors of the citing works (academia, industry, government, etc. This equates to a Covid-19: non-Covid-19 ratio of 5.58 citations per article. 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. Journals with a lower impact (e.g. dividing the total number of citations received by all papers in the group 2019; Seeber et al. 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. ", "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!
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