Self-Citations and Increasing Influence of Our Research on Other Fields

Abstract

This is the last time you are going to see Chicago style being used in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ). This issue is a collector's item that many of you may want to keep on your bookshelves. As we are moving to APA style from the autumn issue, you will see fewer footnotes and our explicit editorial policy discouraging excessive self-citations as listed in our Information for Contributors. The APA style puts authors' names within the main body text, while the references are listed by the authors' last names in alphabetical order. This makes the authors' names much more visible than the Chicago style. Regarding this, some authors received a note from me asking them to refrain from citing their own works too much, because that would have identified them easily. They have been asked to cut their self-citations before we sent the manuscripts out to reviewers. Authors certainly may have done many prior works on the topic that they would like to refer in the manuscript. At a time when impact factor and number of citations is becoming more and more important for institutions, it is understandable that authors may want to include as many of their own works in the manuscript as possible. However, this practice will threaten the integrity of the blind review process. When a reviewer sees an article citing five or more works from the same individual, he or she will question the relationship between the and the individual who got cited so many times. As scholars, we should be judicious in citing our own works and acknowledge others who also have contributed to the same topic. Simply listing author without name in front of the citation will not help as it is very easy to find online the from the article title nowadays. Citing the author's own works the same way as others' works is the best way to avoid the being identified.As I started posting tweets on Twitter for our articles, I realized how our JMCQ articles aroused interest of political scientists, sociologists, scientists, and people in other fields from their retweets. In addition to increasing the theoretical and methodological rigor of our field, highlighting the relationship of our research with other fields will broaden the impact and elevate the status of research in our field. One thing I did quite often recently was to suggest to some of our accepted manuscript authors to consider making their titles more relevant to readers and highlighting the unique contribution or essence of the study. In these days with short text messages dominating online conversations, a good title, just like a news headline, will make a big difference to how many people read the text of the full article. An article with a title that does not reflect the article well will drastically lower its readership potential.New Keyword System in JMCQAuthors and reviewers should know that we now use a new set of keyword categories in the JMCQ manuscript submission system. There are nine keyword categories that are standardized, and all authors are required to choose one or more item in each category as appropriate for their submitted manuscript specifically and themselves as scholars. The nine keyword categories are (1) Topic (34 topics),1 (2) Approach (Quantitative, Qualitative, Mixed, Conceptual only), (3) Method (19 methods),2 (4) Statistics (12 common statistical techniques, quantitative research only),3 (5) Medium (14 media types including media in general),4 (6) Country of study or expertise,5 (7) Theory (29 common theories and a write-in category),6 (8) Research interests related to any of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) division/interest group,7 and (9) author's own keywords (other than those keywords given in the eight categories). I hope this scheme is comprehensive enough to accommodate all types of manuscripts, authors, and reviewers. It will also help new authors to easily see if their manuscript falls within the scope of our journal when they check the categories. …