From Excessive Journal Self-Cites to Citation Stacking: Analysis of Journal Self-Citation Kinetics in Search for Journals, Which Boost Their Scientometric Indicators.

Petr Heneberg,Pablo Dorta-González

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0153730

Abstract

Bibliometric indicators increasingly affect careers, funding, and reputation of individuals, their institutions and journals themselves. In contrast to author self-citations, little is known about kinetics of journal self-citations. Here we hypothesized that they may show a generalizable pattern within particular research fields or across multiple fields. We thus analyzed self-cites to 60 journals from three research fields (multidisciplinary sciences, parasitology, and information science). We also hypothesized that the kinetics of journal self-citations and citations received from other journals of the same publisher may differ from foreign citations. We analyzed the journals published the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature Publishing Group, and Editura Academiei Române. We found that although the kinetics of journal self-cites is generally faster compared to foreign cites, it shows some field-specific characteristics. Particularly in information science journals, the initial increase in a share of journal self-citations during post-publication year 0 was completely absent. Self-promoting journal self-citations of top-tier journals have rather indirect but negligible direct effects on bibliometric indicators, affecting just the immediacy index and marginally increasing the impact factor itself as long as the affected journals are well established in their fields. In contrast, other forms of journal self-citations and citation stacking may severely affect the impact factor, or other citation-based indices. We identified here a network consisting of three Romanian physics journals Proceedings of the Romanian Academy, Series A, Romanian Journal of Physics, and Romanian Reports in Physics, which displayed low to moderate ratio of journal self-citations, but which multiplied recently their impact factors, and were mutually responsible for 55.9%, 64.7% and 63.3% of citations within the impact factor calculation window to the three journals, respectively. They did not receive nearly any network self-cites prior impact factor calculation window, and their network self-cites decreased sharply after the impact factor calculation window. Journal self-citations and citation stacking requires increased attention and elimination from citation indices.

Highlights

With the establishment of bibliometric indicators and standards, they started to affect the careers, funding, and reputation of individuals, their institutions and journals themselves
The network of journals may typically consist of journals published by the same publisher, as we revealed for the three physics journals published by Editura Academiei Române
The kinetics of total cites to the journal was slightly delayed compared to the above, and peaked within the post-publication year 2, when it reached 217,821 cites (19.2% of cites received in post-publication years 0–7)

Summary

Introduction

With the establishment of bibliometric indicators and standards, they started to affect the careers, funding, and reputation of individuals, their institutions and journals themselves. This brought self-citations in all their forms into the spotlight, creating numerous controversies among scholars [1]. Already over a half century ago, Garfield and Sher calculated that 8% of citations were author self-citation, and 20% of citations were journal self-citations [2]. Two types of self-citations were later distinguished, consisting of diachronous (received) and synchronous (made) self-citations [3]. Self-citations are generally younger and have a shorter half-life than foreign citations. Self-citations stabilize in a period of three to four years after publication

Methods

Results

Conclusion