Self-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 sta

Self-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.