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Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
- jacquesm 7y agoGiven that pagerank had its origins in citations it should not be surprising to find link farms and other spam in scientific publications.
- cameronbrown 7y agoThe SEO hackers of their day.
- mathgenius 7y agoThis is not pagerank. But they really should use pagerank in this nature article because (very likely) it will blow away this self-citation problem. People should be able to self-cite as much as they want. Not using pagerank is the problem.
- your-nanny 7y agoPeople who are working out their ideas far outside the mainstream have no one to cite but them selves. Some are quacks, to be sure, but sometimes a field is just not ready for their work because the utility of the idea is not easily apparent, or because it's perceived to be too risky. A field needs a healthy mix of the the curmudgeonly stubborn thinkers going their way no matter the cost, and those making steady progress on solvable problems.
- guntars 7y agoDo you have any good examples, historical or otherwise?
- pkaye 7y agoPossibly Barry Marshall and Robin Warren who discovered H Pylori causes peptic ulcers and subsequently won a Nobel Prize. They were ridiculed by doctors and scientists for their theory.
- jacquesm 7y agoI can see them citing themselves once or twice but not 10's of times or more.
- ummonk 7y agoI was going to suggest Peter Turchin as an outsider to history / sociology but he seems to have been able to get published in highly reputable journals http://peterturchin.com/academic-publications/#Articles_in_Nature_Science_and_PNAS http://peterturchin.com/academic-publications/#Articles_in_N...
- ratmice 7y agoBetween the two authors here (McKinsey and Tarski), they cite each other 7 times, with 14 citations, giving 50% outgoing self-citation, however this paper also received incoming citations contemporaneously... https://doi.org/10.2307/2268135 https://doi.org/10.2307/2268135
- your-nanny 7y agopossibly Sutton and Barto's work on reinforcement learning throughout the 80s.
- justinmeiners 7y agoDijkstra rarely cited others and wrote entire books without citations.
- jacquesm 7y agoSure, but there is no 'pruning of the tree' in case a dead end is reached, so the citations stay allowing the quack to pretend they have more credibility than they do. In fact, the whole idea of these citations is to build credibility where there is none.
- duskwuff 7y agoRight. The purpose of citation metrics is to measure the intellectual influence of a person's ideas. If an academic's works are never being cited by anyone else, the correct conclusion would be that their ideas have little influence -- regardless of how many self-citing papers they've published.
- your-nanny 7y agoinfluence is not the same thing as credibility.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- joe_the_user 7y agoThe need to step outside of mainstream views has been important for intellectual progress over the years, indeed. The problem we have now is we're stuck with a series of bad faith, polarizing and disingenuous views that "suck the oxygen out of" actual wide-ranging thinking - IE, climate denialists can still get a lot of money, anti-vaxers can pull in a lot of money from scams, etc.
- bifrost 7y agoI found this situation regularly when going down the rabbithole of the anti-vaxx or anti-5g people. One "scientist" makes a highly dubious claim, thousands of nutjobs cite this one scientist, "scientist" then goes on to cite articles that cites their work. I'm basically waiting to find Alex Jones cited in a serious article at this point.
- std_throwaway 7y agoIf you work in a very narrow field of science you're basically on your own and have to cite yourself because there's nobody else to cite.
- jedberg 7y agoIn which case you have to ask yourself, are you so brilliant that you’ve found an important topic that no one has considered yet, or have all the brilliant people already figured out that topic isn’t worthy of study? It’s the same with the startup world. If you’re the only one doing a thing, are you brilliant or foolish?
- agdpf 7y ago>In which case you have to ask yourself, are you so brilliant that you’ve found an important topic that no one has considered yet, or have all the brilliant people already figured out that topic isn’t worthy of study? Imagine how many inventions we would have missed if all inventors had shared your mindset.
- whymauri 7y agoWhat? These are perfectly valid questions to be asking and do not inherently stop you from researching what you're working on. I know some scientists that define their research direction by asking these questions first before pursuing an idea. Many great inventions like optogenetics or expansion microscopy came from this investigative strategy. It can help keep your resources and energy in check.
- melling 7y ago"In 2017, a study showed that scientists in Italy began citing themselves more heavily after a controversial 2010 policy was introduced that required academics to meet productivity thresholds to be eligible for promotion" Cobra Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoI don't see that it's the Cobra effect. Did it actively make them less productive?
- HarryHirsch 7y agoPublication standards are different between disciplines. Traditionally, a materials chemist publishes many times more papers than a structural biologist. With a metric like that, you run whole sub-disciplines out of town.
- Gibbon1 7y agoReminds me of a theater professor I know who was having trouble meeting the new rigorous rules for tenure. Publish? What and where exactly?
- duskwuff 7y agoIf it means that some academics are choosing to cite their own papers rather than keeping up to date on the literature of their field, there's likely to be some potential insights missed.
- lonelappde 7y agoThere's no reason to assume that adding a self cite affects how much they read others.
- usrusr 7y agoNot self-citing in incremental work would be like a software team erasing commit history at the beginning of each sprint, claiming that it's all new code. The post-metric amount of self citing might be less misleading than what they did before.
- joe_the_user 7y agoOn a semi-related note, I occasionally look at the news items Google news suggests for me, and these include a significant portion of climate change denialists propaganda, including one shocked, shocked by Nature "suppressing academic freedom with this list" (and my searches are never for climate denialism). Which is to say, these may be a few sciences but it seems like they significant resources behind them, somehow.
- zdragnar 7y agoStrange, I use google news on a semi regular basis, and have the opposite experience; most are fairly bland coverage of climate science research announcements with the occasional hyperbolic doomsday stuff.
- std_throwaway 7y agoYou need a source of trust in these systems. Journals used to have that role. They had high standards that were upheld by editors selecting only worthy publications. Today it seems that many journals aren't as trustworthy as they seemed to be in the past. It's also easier to spam the journals with your publication and to bullshit your way into publication. The incentives to publish a lot are also way higher now that your grant money is highly dependent on your citation count. Journals can publish more and easier and lower the standards for submission to earn more money. The system is basically eating itself and we haven't found a cure yet. Filtering for self-citations is useful to identify the bubbles. But it is not sufficient to determine if those bubbles only contain hot air or if these scientists are actually working on something with substance in a narrow field where few others publish.
- snarf21 7y ago"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" -Upton Sinclair
- Vinnl 7y agoCitations should primarily serve to mention relevant work, which often includes authors' earlier works. The problem really is the abuse of citation metrics and journal brand names (and especially journal-based metrics) as a means of evaluating researchers. What we really need is a different method of evaluating researchers that does not rely on where they publish or what they cite. (But I would say that, given that I work on one such a system.)
- techie128 7y agoNot defending people who self-cite but here is an alternative explanation. There are many areas of science that have very few researchers working on the same or related problems. In addition papers tend to build on prior works of the same or related researchers. Over time we may see clusters of what look like "self-cited" papers. This is not abnormal.
- lilott8 7y agoYup, I self-cite quite a bit. But not to demonstrate productivity or some other arbitrary metric(s). I self-cite because the images I use in my research are really difficult to make and I'm in a niche enough field that using the images really helps people who are not familiar with the area understand what is going on. These images were arduous to make, so I reuse them. (I should note, that I've gotten in "trouble" for reusing them without a citation).
- lolc 7y agoSelf-citation or clique-citation is only problematic if it doesn't fulfil its main purpose of providing relevant references. This should not be a surprising statement. But we just read an article where that property of citations is a sideshow. We got to the point where citation scores are bandied about without even asking the main question: "Well are the papers any good?" And now I worry that papers could get worse simply because of a citation-inflation. I'm currently reading "The Systems Model of Creativity; The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" and was really surprised at the rate of self-citation in the included papers. Now it does seem to me that the cited studies are relevant. And I can't judge whether there would have been papers from other authors even better suited for citing. And why am I even reading that book? Well because of the persistence with which Csikszentmihalyi gets cited in other writings I read. How do I know these writers weren't shills for Csikszentmihalyi? I don't care all that much when the material is good. So in the end should I care about backwater publications that cite themselves excessively? Because I don't have to read them. As a consumer I don't seem to get hurt by the practice.
- bluetwo 7y agoLike many other good things, you've got to figure out what to do when the @ssholes show up.
- hannob 7y agoThe core problem here is that universities think that citation statistics are a useful metric to evaluate the quality of the work of a scientist. There's plenty of evidence that this is not the case or that even the reverse may be the case [1], but this idea refuses to die. [1]
- godelski 7y agoDid you forget to include the source? (I'm using an app so maybe it's not displaying it?)
- esotericn 7y agoWhoosh.
- hdrujvw-4579 7y agonot everyone is in the same mindset, no need to be a jerk about it.
- esotericn 7y agotickle
- godelski 7y agoLol that's definitely what happened. Looked back after this and had a laugh at myself. It's been a long day. I appreciate the defense but I don't find the "whoosh" comment offensive. I'll own up to my lapse.
- Raphmedia 7y agoIs "Woosh" really being that much of a jerk? It's a reference to https://www.xkcd.com/1627/ https://www.xkcd.com/1627/
- Raphmedia 7y ago[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20752035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20752035
- bitL 7y agoNumber of citations in academia == lines of code as a metrics for a software developer?
- einpoklum 7y agoI'm not Italian... and am not meeting any productivity threshold. But my work is incremental, and I obviously don't want to repeat what I said in a different paper, so I cite earlier work in later work. TBH, I don't think it's possible to avoid self-citation unless: 1. Your research is so popular that by the time you need to cite it, it's been surveyed, or improved upon, or otherwise adapted. 2. You switch research subjects relatively often. 3. You publish "blocks" of work, each based on fundamentals in your field established by others - and they're not incremental.
- maaaats 7y agoIt doesn't say that self-citation is wrong per se, but that some people use it to game their citation count to the extreme.
- cbanek 7y agoAs someone who now works in astronomy, I'm not at all surprised at the high self-citation rate for the field. It is true that a lot of papers are published by large consortiums. For example, at LSST (where I work), if you have been working on the project for 2 years, you are considered a "builder" and added as an author to all major project wide papers. Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are cited a lot, and have hundreds of authors. I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author. (Or really, at least the first few authors) It seems like for the data shown, it is just if anyone in the author list is anywhere in the author list of the citation? Also for some research niches, you may be one of the few people writing papers on a subject. There's no one else to cite. I do think there's some very valid points about bringing the person up to speed on previous research that brought them to the current paper. But I don't think those citations should really count as a citation in terms of metrics for how successful a scientist is. To be honest, I find all the metric gaming about number of papers and citations to be ridiculous. I don't hear many people saying they want to write the best paper in their field, or something new. It all seems to be a numbers game these days. Academic career growth hacking, if you will.
- Jhsto 7y ago> I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author. Also, it's worth mentioning that countries which support PhD via publication essentially require you to conduct self-citing research. This is to show you've had a common thread between your research, and that the PhD can be defended as to have all the papers be considered to be on the same subject.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- skohan 7y agoTo be honest it seems perfectly reasonably for a researcher to bring up their own related work. Maybe there should just be a separate metric which separates self-citations so it's transparent.
- vernie 7y agoI know it's a consequence of conference and journal guidelines but nothing bothers me more than researchers who self-cite in the third person.
- 19ylram49 7y agoA particular interest of mine is database systems (and by extension, distributed systems) and I’ve noticed this pattern a fair amount when reading database-related CS papers. It tends to feel like a small circle of researchers citing each other. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t say much about the actual quality of said papers, but it’s a pattern that I’ve definitely noticed. As a result of this, I tend to also make sure that I pay attention to seemingly interesting papers with low citations; sometimes, it immediately makes sense why they have low citations, while, other times, I find myself fascinated by the research despite the low citations.
- seieste 7y agoSome fields are very small, and some authors only focus on one small part of a field. So, high citation count isn't always a direct indicator of quality.
- jeffwass 7y agoMy undergrad college physics professor (Fay Ajzenberg-Selove) introduced this metric back in the 50’s. She faced major sexism and bullshit claims against her productivity, and had to use this metric to prove her detractors wrong, that she was as good as or better than most of her male colleagues in terms of performing useful and interesting research, to earn herself a faculty position. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Ajzenberg-Selove https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Ajzenberg-Selove
- jeffwass 7y agoDid I describe this wrong? Not sure why it got moderates down. Basically, my professor was one of the first female physicists trying to make it in a clearly male-dominated field nearly 60+ years ago. She was not offered jobs, or jobs at reduced salary vs male colleagues, being told her research was not as productive. She literally invented the concept of considering number of citations as a proof of impact, relevancy, and productivity, and showed that her work was better than most of her male colleagues. Only after she jumped through this hoop herself was she able to get a faculty position. Damn impressive of her.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoPerhaps it would be useful for reviewers to point out which citations do not contribute to the paper? It really is a tough problem. If someone is toiling along in some niche they have carved out, they and their colleagues may be the only one working in that space. That leads to a lot of cross citation and self citation. That said, if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A. It might make for in interesting data set to plot out those sorts of relationships.
- mehrdadn 7y ago> if you publish paper A, and then cite it in paper B which builds on that work, then in paper C you really only need to cite paper B if you're building on the work, not B and A. Logically I agree with you, but a lot of academics seem to believe differently when it comes to citing other people's work, and if we are to go by that logic (which a lot of people are inevitably forced to do), I don't see why one should treat their own work any differently.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoThat's a fair point. Having reviewing policies that would call that out however could hopefully push back on the behavior.
- _delirium 7y agoAs a reader I personally prefer if they do a more complete set of citations, instead of making me follow up a multi-step chain to dig them up, as if I'm a compiler resolving transitive dependencies. I like little history-map sentences like: "This technique was introduced by Foo (1988) and recast in the modern computational formalism by Bar (2009); the present work uses an optimized variant (Bar 2012)." You could just cite the last paper here, which is the only one used directly, and which presumably itself cites the earlier papers. But it's more useful to me if you include the version of the sentence that cites all three and briefly explains their relationship.
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- holy_city 7y agoInterestingly enough, the published work [1] has two self-citations. So maybe there's something to that phrase, “the next work cannot be carried on without referring to previous work.” [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000384 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
- carusooneliner 7y agoRegrettable that the article begins by outing a prof from an unheard of university in India, who probably publishes in low repute journals and conference. Ideally the citing malfeasance score should be weighted based on journal and conference reputation.
- Vinnl 7y agoAnd how do you measure journal and conference reputation? Conventional measures there also lean on citations, and journals have been known to do quite a bit of manipulation to get those scores up.
- carusooneliner 7y agoStart with Google Scholar's list of top publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues, and detect self-citing and citing rings within the universe of these publications. Almost certainly the guy with the record for self-citing doesn't have a paper in any of the top publications.
- not2b 7y agoSelf-citation is appropriate for a new paper that builds on the results of a previous paper. But in evaluating how influential a researcher is, it makes sense to exclude self-citation, while being careful to avoid any implication that self-citation is wrong.
- n1231231231234 7y agowhen self-citation is OK and when it is not OK should be part of one's academic training/phd training. PLOS gives reasonable citation guidelines, and in this context their Rule 5 is particular relevant: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006036 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- ccalf 7y agoI find this approach strangely condescending. For example the author says: > Understanding the value attributed to X, Y, and Z in that particular text requires assessment of the rhetorical strategies of the author(s). They could've just said, if you want to know why the author thinks XYZ are important, you need to look at what they are saying about it. I'm a hardcore postmodern leftist, but I don't see how writing in such a contorted way helps practicing scientists. In fact I would argue that this kind of listing obscures a politics of its own; it is so busy prescribing citation practices that it won't examine its own politics. That said, it's the first time I've seen this guide so maybe I need to read up on the issues; a list of do's / don'ts isn't the best way to introduce and help people understand the issues.
- throwawaywego 7y agoThe opposite of extreme self-citing is self-plagiarism (either out of ignorance, to avoid extreme self-citing on ground-breaking research, or with malicious intent: passing the same paper to multiple journals as a new result). > The rate of duplication in the rest of the biomedical literature has been estimated to be between 10% to 20% (Jefferson, 1998), though one review of the literature suggests the more conservative figure of approximately 10% (Steneck, 2000). https://ori.hhs.gov/plagiarism-13 https://ori.hhs.gov/plagiarism-13 If work by another author was enough to inspire you and add a reference, then your own previous work should certainly qualify, if it added inspiration to the current paper. Self-citing provides a "paper trail" for the reader when they want to investigate a claim or proof further. (Like PageRank, it is very possible to discount internal PR/links under external links, and when you also take into account the authority of the referencer, you avoid scientists accumulating references from non-peer reviewed Arxiv publications).
- tony 7y agoIf you narrow yourself to a specific niche well enough, you'll see the same names in citations. To be fair, the areas I dig into don't feel nearly as competitive as say, physics, which I couldn't make heads or tails of. The whole reason the internet and wikis took off is we were very liberal in how we linked. If we disallowed inbound citations, wouldn't it be a lot harder to backtrack and grasp contextual underpinnings? Anecdote: In the field of adult attachment theory <-> love there are a few prominent scholars that cite each other: Shaver, Hazan, Mikulincer. They do papers citing their own work and each other [1]. There's also a book by Mikulincer highlights Shaver's upbringing with his parents, his past as a hippy, etc. They're delivering very nice content, and they cite others outside their ("circle"?) Are there potentially scholars in the field with valuable contributions that go unnoticed? Possibly. It doesn't make self-citations in their papers any less helpful. Also I worry that regulating citations through some system may affect the quality of content and fix something that's not broken. Which brings me to another issue, aren't we supposed to be helping each other? [1] Example: http://adultattachmentlab.human.cornell.edu/HazanShaver1990.pdf http://adultattachmentlab.human.cornell.edu/HazanShaver1990....
- LeonB 7y agoWhen you say ‘“circle”?’ I think “clique” is appropriate as ‘a network where every node is connected to every other node’.
- o_p 7y agoMaybe there exist an academic equivalent to blackhat PBNs, groups of academic self-referencing in loops to boost their citations. Number of citiations seems like an awful measure for academic contribution.
- sytelus 7y agoPageRank was precisely invented to solve this issue. I have never understood why Google Scholar itself took stance not to even compute it and stick to h-index. Google Scholar is a defacto standard for looking up researchers and whatever metric they adopt would be adopted by the rest of the world.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoIt's frustrating to see science emasculating itself and rely on commercial, even monopolistic services when there is no lack of research in document search and comprehension. Ten or fifteen years ago there was citeseer for tracking citations. It was a messy Perl program/site to scan through mostly TeX files for metadata and references, yet it worked relatively well, and was held reasonably up-to-date. Then they rewrote it into CiteseerX, such that it became useless. It never recovered.
- Vinnl 7y agoDoesn't PageRank have the exact same problem of manipulation, where people link to other sites in order to prop those sites up, just like people cite articles to prop them (or their authors) up?
- jonny383 7y agoI worked as a RA in my university days in a large, globally reputable university in Australia. I can safely say there was a culture of: 1. Dismissing research from other staff who had "less than X" citations as non-sense. And 2: Self-referencing from new academics trying to break into the "exclusive, trusted" club. It was genuine madness that corrupted a lot of good people.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoFor those who wonder why there are climate-change deniers who won't listen to "the science" this article is for you. The sad and honest fact is, science has become a spin-factory in a way mainstream media has. Yes, in theory, the scientic method / process is a wonderful standard. Unfortunately, once it's exposed to egos and profits it becomes somethings else far less worth of praise and honor. I'm not doing a take down of science, science has already done that to itself. The sooner the rest of us come to terms with that, the better.
- toomuchequate 7y agoIf you want to be immune, look at the data. They can lie in experiments and stats, but that is up to you to decide.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoSays ChiefAlchemist? Twas Newton's chief failing, alchemy.
- PeterStuer 7y agoWhat surprises me is how naive the scientific community publicly pretends to be on these matters. We 'marketed' science as due to our socioeconomic dogmas vaguely based on completely misunderstood caricatured Darwin ion theory there can be no alternative. We turn science into a quantative metrics game, and by golly, act all surprised that scientists do game the system? How useful do you think Google Search would be if they just stopped after Pagerank v0.1 and called it a day, then let all the websites 'vote with their links'?
- tezthenerd 7y agoA few months ago a couple of physics postdocs set up a website (vanityindex dot com) and proposed a few "vanity metrics". Can be fun to check out your own vanity index and that of your colleagues.
- khawkins 7y agoWent into the data and took the top 1000 individuals with self cite percentages over 40%, then sorted by institution. Nearly every major institution had individuals in this group: Johns Hopkins (4), Cal Tech (4), Georgia Tech (2), MIT (5), each of the Max Planck Institute campuses (3-7), Moscow State (7), Penn State (6), Stanford (1), Utrecht (2), University of Zurich (4), ETH Zurich (1), DLR (3), Imperial College London (3), University of Tokyo (2), Princeton (5), Kyoto University (4)... I feel like if this problem were very concerning we'd see the distribution concentrated at certain institutions but I'm not sure there's one with over 10 researchers at them. We hear a lot about questionable Chinese journals, but the highest institution in this list is the Chinese Academy of Sciences with 3 individuals. I think the more likely case is there are a few bad apples, some bad practices we can't ever fully get rid of, and that some research lends itself more to self-citation.
- weq 7y agoThe fundemental problem with science today is that it needs funding. Funding means vested interests. If a scientist is trying to game the system, they are doing it to secure future funding. Either they are gaming the system to make the funder look good, or to appeal to a future funder.
- SubiculumCode 7y agoTo be fair to some researchers in certain specializations, there may only be a handful of scientists publishing on the topic. Self-Citation proceeds naturally from such circumstances.
- tilolebo 7y agoNow the question we all want to have answered: what's the database engine?
- InfinityByTen 7y agoThis is a news? I thought the Publish or Perish idiom made it obvious. 2 weeks of effort goes into doing something and you spend 2 months of writing a paper of the slightest of the result. Many of these papers introduce an infinitesimal increment to knowledge, at best and you can tell how long would it have taken to get it working. And this is Numerical Mathematics. There are clans of Mathematicians who just go around citing each other. And a quality paper comes around every 5 years or so.
- wbillingsley 7y agoAs an indication that this is a hard problem to solve, remember that these papers have usually gone through peer review anonymised. They cite "Smith & Jones 1982", but it might not be obvious from the writing that they are either Smith or Jones.
- wbillingsley 7y agoI completely agree with this. Sometimes you have to look closer than people often do to spot self-citation.
- tdhz77 7y agoLike a Las Vegas show rated #1 by the casino owned magazine. They were voted #1, however.
- bencollier49 7y agoDid they assess this list for GDPR and harassment law in the UK? IANAL, but if I was naming and shaming in this way via a derived data set, I'd be scared of getting into quite a lot of trouble with the law.
- ____smurf____ 7y agoA lot of researchers build upon their previous work, and the work of their peers. I don't see how researchers can avoid citing their old work in this case.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoCounting citations is a rubbish metric in general. It's supposed to be a proxy for reserach quality but it's so easy to "game" (in the sense of optimising for citation count, rather than research quality) that a high number of citations doesn't mean anything. Neither does a low number of citations. For example, my field is small and kind of esoteric, so we don't get lots of citations either from the outside or the inside (one of the most influential papers in the field has... 286 citations on Semantic Scholar; since 1995). With a field as small as a couple hundred researchers it's also very easy to give the appearance of a citation mill. Given that papers will focus on a very specific subject in the purview of the field, it is inevitable that each researcher who studies that specific subject will cite the same handful of researchers' papers over and over again- and be herself cited by them, since she's now publishing on the subject that interests them. As to self-citations, like Ioannidis himself says there are legitimate reasons, for instance, a PhD student publishing with her thesis advisor as a co-author. The student will most probably be working on subjects that the advisor has already published on and in fact will most likely be extending the advisor's prior work. So the advisor's prior work will be cited in the student's papers. So I'm really not sure what we're learning in the general case by counting citations, other than that a certain paper has a certain number of citations.
- choeger 7y agoHmmm. There is also the problem that you cannot distinguish between a citation and a mere reference. I used to cite earlier work a lot for context, not for mining citations.
- higherkinded 7y ago"...so again, like I said earlier,.."
- otakucode 7y agoIf you try to reduce a complex intellectual task to a metric or a checklist, you are begging for exploitation.
- tikiman163 7y agoHaving conducted a reasonable amount of academic and scientific research, this metric is more likely to be mischaracterizing research than revealing any issues. This doesn't even establish a causal-link between self-citation and poor research quality, it just assumes it. Most researchers continue to do new research on the same concept after a publication, and they will of course site their earlier work when continuing. Additionally, post-graduate researchers often have their names placed on the research of grad students they are in charge of, even though they often have minimal involvement in the research or conclusions drawn. You might be able tell something from the ratio of other authors from all citations to the number of self-citations, but only if you could eliminate self citations that were not either inclusion by proxy or cases where they are merely continuing research on the same topic with new methodologies. There are already methods for identifying bad research, none of which can be achieved through the use of non-human-assisted data analysis of the authors list of research. The only way to be sure is critical review and 3rd party verification of results with repeated experiments.