Google Scholar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. The Citation Tracker feature also allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart and for removal of self-citations from the overall citation counts. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.02948. A theoretical evaluation of Hirsch-type bibliometric indicators confronted with extreme self-citation. [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. 2019; Seeber et al. 2019; DAntuono and Ciavarella 2019; Ioannidis et al. Previous studies have looked at citation rates for preprints of Covid-19 papers [17] and quality of evidence contained within published Covid-19 articles [18, 19]. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. (2015). The number of times Covid-19 publications are being cited throughout the literature appears remarkably high but has not been directly compared to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals over an extended period. PLOS ONE, 11(2), e0148257. Because of extreme skews, thresholds can only be indicative under any circumstances. 2019; Kacem et al. Correspondence to 2006; Schubert et al. 3 (self-referencing) and Fig. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2014.11.008. Journal of Information Science,37(5), 453461. An important recent development in research on citation impact is the discovery of universality, or citation impact patterns that hold across different disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714522871. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026644. All articles published within the 24-month time frame were selected to produce an average citation rate for the journal itself over that period. 2019; Seeber et al. Are sociologists publications uncited? Scientometrics,73(3), 321330. II. [29] In 2008 the Journal of Medical Internet Research began publishing views and Tweets. [23], Citations are distributed highly unequally among researchers. So the FWCI would be 23 / 18 = 1.28. Communism, universalism and disinterestedness: Re-examining contemporary support among academics for Mertons scientific norms. Zaggl, M. A. 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. Mishra, S., Fegley, B. D., Diesner, J., & Torvik, V. I. Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Typically, the citation rate of papers published in the last three years are below the citation rate for all years. [59][60] The latter model is even used as a predictive tool for determining the citations that might be obtained at any time of the lifetime of a corpus of publications. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089193. Hicks, D. (2012). Scientometrics,90(2), 343360. That figure is close to the findings of many other researchers in the following five decades. 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. Fong, E. A. Some results on function and quality of citations. For all years, Microbiology papers in the 10% percentile received a minimum of 38 citations. 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. 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). ScienceDirect offers a search feature that displays cited references (journal articles or books) for a specific author or publication. This would mean that the article was cited 28% more times than expected for articles of the same field, publication type, and publication year. dividing the total number of citations received by all papers in the group Furthermore, many will be seen by more junior peers as exemplars of leadership in their field and the standards they set would therefore be deemed appropriate to the field. Pichappan, P., & Sarasvady, S. (2002). The fourth age of research. Self-citation corrections for the Hirsch index. 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. We had reason to question this approach when we noted that China was leading in citation rates comm.). 's (2016) paper. Reasons behind the major increase in citations for Covid-19 articles seem straightforward. baseline measure is the all-years citation rate, which is the citation rate for Another baseline measure is the all-years citation rate, which is the citation rate for a 10-year period. 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. 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. Some characteristics of citing works that can be used for narrative purposes include: The inherent assumption is that significant publications will demonstrate a high citation count. 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. 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). This is an increase of 64% over the previous year. 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]. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-008-2160-2. RCRs will also only take into account citations from articles in PubMed (i.e., citations from publications that are not in PubMed will not be factored into an article's RCR). An index to quantify an individuals scientific research output. ESI Data In response, the scientific field has dedicated enormous amounts of resources to researching the virus and its effects. 2015; Bakare and Lewison 2017; Bornmann et al. ScienceDirect is a database that contains over 25% of the worlds science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information (journals and books) published by Elsevier and other publishers. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,61(7), 15141515. Heneberg, P. (2016). Examples: For Articles in the field . Changing patterns of self-citation: Cumulative inquiry or self-promotion? Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2018). 2019). The Frontiers Neuroscience journal series includes all Frontiers journals in the field of Neuroscience. The smaller sets had too few articles to analyze, however, so the final number of field/year combinations analyzed was slightly less. https://doi.org/10.1556/650.2016.30443. time. The h-index and self-citations. Aksnes, D. W. (2003). The average for the ESI Mathematics is, in fact, a high outlier itself, for both self-referencing and even more for self-citing. The extended verification and manual curation applied to these data has enabled us to focus with some accuracy on the citation behaviour that is revealed and, since this group necessarily includes a high proportion of leading and influential researchers, the behaviour reflected in these data may be taken as a signal of established cultural norms. Keep in mind that citation rates are calculated from the citation counts of Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators. [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]. Scientometrics,77(2), 373375. 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). A FWCI of 1 is considered average, while a FWCI of greater than 1 is above average. Journal of Informetrics,10(2), 552566. van Raan, A. F. J. Each graph shows the frequency distribution of the original data for the researchers and a computed log-normal fit of these data to a negative binomial distribution. During the past two decades concern over the extent of an authors self-citation has risen in tandem with increased emphasis on citation-related performance indicators in the context of research evaluation and competition for support (Hicks 2012; Wilsdon et al. Social Studies of Science,44(4), 625637. The 10-year averages are calculated from citations from articles published during the same 10-year period. Is the researcher a senior investigator with a long record of publication? The fields are ranked by the 2000-10 citation averages. "Only" 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% (!) 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. A note on self-citation rates in astronomical papers. Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions. 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). Huang, M. H., & Lin, W. Y. C. (2011). Galvez, R. H. (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02019738. - 5.161.154.99. A bibliometric approach to the role of author self-citations in scientific communication. It follows that 90% of Microbiology papers published in 2011 received fewer than 14 citations. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000027310.68393.bc. Glnzel, W. (2008). The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 46(2), 102105. ), 21st International conference on science and technology indicators (STI 2016), pp. COVID papers have accounted for 16% of all citations to psychology papers in 2020, and more than 19% in 2021. Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Meoli, M., & Malighetti, P. (2019). Merton, R. K. (1942). Scientometrics,5(4), 211218. Journal of Information Science,24(6), 431435. They are not statistical tests but point to rather than definitively identifying possible cases of excessive self-citation. The question is pertinent because self-citation has featured in recent publications that address the possible misrepresentation of research performance by individuals and, specifically, attempts to game citation scores (Baccini et al. 2017). The trajectory changes at the higher end, curving upwards towards much greater self-citation rates. The identification of a fixed fraction, such as the upper decile, as outliers is evidently inappropriate. (2019) were right to draw attention to the statistical properties of these distributions: they have regular and testable properties. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World,3, 122. Citation impact is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tang, M., Bever, J. D., & Yu, F. H. (2017). Ioannidis, J. P. A. Engqvist, L., & Frommen, J. G. (2008). Because baselines are based on the mean set of papers and the mean is influencedby the presence of highly cited papers, the mean average will be considerably higher than the median.