Self-citations are often hard to avoid (in particular in more formal academic writing, in which you want to establish the delta of your current work wrt. your p

Self-citations are often hard to avoid (in particular in more formal academic writing, in which you want to establish the delta of your current work wrt. your previous works). It is striking, however, that the author exclusively cites himself. This is kind of weird, because it makes it look like the line of work is not related to anything anybody else is doing (lacks relevance).