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I spotted a paper with around 106 citations, around which 86 are just the author citing himself. Now I understand that people do this to work on their previous studies, but 86? That's around just 20 citations you've received for your paper. Another paper of his has 96 citations with 87 being self. Is this normal or excessive?

Peter Mortensen
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Hi hwsjai
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    It would depend on the paper. Are they lots of citations for a few papers, or for many papers? Is he working in a very small subfield? Is there an alternative to these citations? After all, self plagiarism needs to be avoided. By itself, the number means little. – Buffy Dec 30 '21 at 14:24
  • @Buffy it's not a vague field. It's a quite popular one I'd say. But regardless a whole of 86 citations ? And this number is constant for most of his papers? Isn't this self citation abuse? – Hi hwsjai Dec 30 '21 at 14:28
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    Ask, rather, are the citations needed. Also ask whether other things should have been cited also or instead. See the answer of Dilworth – Buffy Dec 30 '21 at 14:37
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    The worst I ever saw was 55 references, of which 54 were to the author’s own publications. – Ed V Dec 30 '21 at 15:49
  • https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21797/how-to-discourage-irrelevant-self-citation – Anonymous Physicist Dec 30 '21 at 16:12
  • https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/99875/curious-case-of-self-citations-and-how-to-monitor-self-citers?rq=1 – Anonymous Physicist Dec 30 '21 at 16:13
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    The question is whether the citations are relevant or not. Some authors work in a specialized field, or with specialized approaches in a popular field. So it is relevant to cite themselves. The problem is different in this case: if they are the only one working in their subfield or using their approach, then maybe it's not a good approach? – Dilworth Dec 30 '21 at 16:43
  • @Dilworth Thank you – Hi hwsjai Dec 30 '21 at 16:49
  • Can be normal, I just read an preprint and 30% of the citations are self-citations. This is probably the limit of justifiable number of self-citations in an article. – Tom Dec 31 '21 at 17:25
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    A while ago I peer reviewed a paper with 22 self citations, which does seem a bit like they are playing ''the citations game''. – Tom Jan 01 '22 at 17:36
  • I voted to close but I do not agree with the stated close reason. The corect close reason is duplicate of this – Caleb Stanford Jan 02 '22 at 19:48
  • @6005 why are you always so insistent on closing the question? Is there some problem? – Hi hwsjai Jan 03 '22 at 03:40
  • As I said: I do not agree with those voting to close for "strongly depending on individual factors" (does not apply here), and I did not vote to close for this reason. I voted to close to provide additional visibility to the duplicate question. – Caleb Stanford Jan 03 '22 at 06:00
  • To clarify: there's no problem with your question and it is a good one. The closure is an artifact of the software which closes the question on 5 votes despite that I do not agree with the stated reason. Let me know if it is still not clear. – Caleb Stanford Jan 03 '22 at 06:12
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    @6005 and other close voters: I disagree with the close votes and have voted to reopen, since the heuristics I give allow one to assess situations like these without knowing the individual papers and since the linked questions are different enough that the answers do not provide such heuristics. – jakebeal Jan 03 '22 at 10:26

5 Answers5

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Self-citations are valid, but too much is a bad sign:

  • On the one hand, an author with an ongoing research program will generally have significant prior work that needs to be cited.
  • On the other hand, all scientific work exists in a larger intellectual context for which Joy's law applies: lots of other smart people are doing related work that needs to be acknowledged.

High rates of self-citation thus generally indicate authors that are either:

  1. intellectually isolated,
  2. delusionally arrogant, or
  3. deliberately manipulating citation statistics.

But how high is too high?

As a rough heuristic, I have come to regard 1/3 as a useful upper bound on reasonable self-citation. That means that most citations are elsewhere, even for papers with very strong prior work to cite. I also generally find that the higher the total citation count, the lower the fraction that are self-citations (i.e., volume of prior work scales more slowly than complexity of scientific context). Conversely, the ratio may break down entirely in short works with artificially limited citation counts, e.g., in extended abstracts where all but a few absolutely mandatory citations are pruned for reasons of space.

Applying these heuristics to the cases that you describe, I would assess the citation ratios 86/106 and 87/96 as almost certainly indicating deliberate manipulation of citation statistics. If the fractions were similar but the citation count was small (e.g., <20 total), then it might be legitimate or a result of intellectual isolation. Even with lots of prior work, however, there is almost never a reason to cite so many different pieces of it, as a prolific author will generally also write review papers that are better to cite than the individual papers that went into them---and review papers have limited self-citation because they are describing other people's work as well. The author might be delusionally arrogant too, but there's a lot more citation manipulators out there than researchers who are both delusional and highly prolific.

Bottom line: probably deliberate citation manipulation.

jakebeal
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  • Agreed. And who would want to read such self aggrandising stuff anyway? – Anton Dec 31 '21 at 10:06
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    Those three bullet points for high rate of self-citations are so on point! – Aly Abdelaziz Dec 31 '21 at 16:40
  • +1 Spot on. Although your last claim: "... there's a lot more citation manipulators out there than researchers who are both delusional and highly prolific" seems true for hard sciences (or STEM in the US), the rate of delusional researchers is a lot higher in the humanities, e.g. anthropology and sociology. – Servaes Dec 31 '21 at 18:48
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    With regards to the humanities: are the researchers that you would consider delusional also highly prolific? In the STEM world, the ones that I have encountered typically have low rates of publication due to their isolation, and thus would not have a large number of publications available to cite. – jakebeal Dec 31 '21 at 20:24
  • These numbers can't be accurately explained by someone (over-)cautiously avoiding self-plagiarism? Hanlon's razor comes to mind. – Mast Jan 01 '22 at 17:08
  • @Mast Almost certainly not, else a) they'd have a lot more to cite from other people too, and b) they should have review papers to cite. – jakebeal Jan 01 '22 at 18:06
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Citations are neither a competition, nor a prize. They are simply a tool to refer to previous scientific work in order to establish the scientific case of the paper.

The fact that some people have decided that citations are in fact a good measure for "success", or a good case for "promotion", does not mean that citations should be perceived as anything else than a scientific tool, rather than a merit, prize or a favour.

Thus, there is nothing "excessive" in itself in loads of self-citations. Each citation should be evaluated solely based on the scientific justification of the cited work and its relevance to the current work, and there is nothing in your question that provides a witness for an unjustified citation. In other words, it is impossible to answer your question based solely on numbers and percentage of self-citations.

In other words, the question about many self-citations is whether the citations are relevant or not. Some authors work in a specialized field, or with specialized approaches in a popular field. So it is relevant to cite themselves. Overall, the problem of high percentage of self citations is different: if they are almost the only ones working in their subfield or using their approach, then maybe it's not a good approach?

Dilworth
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    "Citations are neither a competition, nor a prize." This is the case in principle, not in reality. – SeF Jan 01 '22 at 15:07
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    Well, if it is a "prize" as you contend, then I don't blame the author for generously awarding themselves with such prizes! – Dilworth Jan 02 '22 at 15:28
  • The prevalence of self citation also creates a funny situation in the double-blind review. Almost all of the few papers I had reviewed, the anonymous authors (or research group) that wrote the paper was very easy to spot. – SeF Jan 11 '22 at 09:21
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    @SeF, yes, but it's completely justified scientifically to self-cite your own work assuming you continue with the same research direction you've been doing in recent years. – Dilworth Jan 11 '22 at 14:44
  • Dilworth , I never said it is not justified. – SeF Jan 16 '22 at 11:29
  • You both have a point. Lots of (self-)citations are not going to make fellow scientists think better of that person, in some cases it's quite the opposite... But funding agencies like to think otherwise. Obnoxious as the chest-thumping might be, this is how they survive and keep on getting resources to produce more results. Thankfully, it is still possible to get reasonable funding without resorting to that. – Lodinn Jan 16 '22 at 12:06
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86 self-citations out of 106 is definitely abnormal. Most (all?) editors would want to investigate. It's not necessarily malicious, but it's something to check out.

Allure
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    If it's been published, the editor had a say, as did the reviewers. And "unusual" might be a better term than "abnormal". Just as "huge" might be better than "absurd", which implies a judgement has been made already. – Buffy Dec 30 '21 at 14:48
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  1. There are certainly cases where a researcher is a pioneer in a specialty field, where they may have produced a large volume of work on a "niche" topic that comprises a large fraction of all of the work.

  2. There are certainly cases where a researcher is invited to write a survey or review paper or one that covers the evolution of a specific research topic.

It is possible that these two could be concurrent.

So asking about a single instance without describing the nature of the paper along those two axes leaves open the possibility that this is by design, i.e. what the journals' editor(s) hoped for.

However:

Another paper of his has 96 citations with 87 being self. Is this normal or excessive?

Ya, could be, unless the concurrence happened twice; the author was invited to write two survey or review papers and you happened to find both.

uhoh
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Yes, it is normal and it is the equivalent of doping in sport.

If your competing organisation is self-citing, and both your competitor and you are equally piffle in doing research, then the only way to survive for you is to self-cite as well.

This has two interesting consequences:

  • the larger the research group the higher the number of artificial citations the participants can get.
  • the doped paper that go through blind peer review is de facto not anonymous (the self citation points eloquently at the authoring research group): two competing organisations can help each others to dope up the number of citations (I approve yours self-citing paper, you approve mine).

The positive note is that this mechanism is only doping up the bottom. Honest and really breakthrough research work have a number of citations that is unreachable for the self-citing research groups.

For example the paper by Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" has alone more citations than the total number of citations of the self-citing professor in his whole career.

SeF
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