It is reasonable to expect that these rates are higher than those for all papers in a field, but the margin of difference is impossible to determine. Another limitation of this study is that open-access versus subscription-based journals were not filtered separately during the WOS search. Note we are excluding the number of citations received in 2021, as FWCIs only include citations to an article 3 complete calendar years after its publication. 2019; Biagioli et al. Typically, the 11-year average is approximately half that for papers from 2000 cited from that year to 2010. 4 (self-citing) and in the Appendix (Table2: self-referencing and Table3: self-citing) as linear data for ready interpretation of percentages. It is argued that, in fact, the status of self-citations is more than that of a stepchild in the family of scientometrics (Schubert 2016). Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A new metric that uses citation rates to measure influence at the article level. Such reasons imply behaviors that conform both to Mertonian norms and also to the social constructivist interpretation of citation theory (Merton 1942; Kaplan 1965; Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975; Gilbert 1977; Cozzens 1989; Bonzi and Snyder 1991; White 2001; Bornmann and Daniel 2008; Davis 2009; Erikson and Erlandson 2014; Tahamtan and Bornmann 2018, 2019; Aksnes et al. Citation Rates - Clarivate https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03417-5, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03417-5. To aid in interpretation, therefore, we adopted a graphical approach and both linear and log plots and analyses of referencing and citing rates were examined. The first of these reviews, produced by Fatori and Seekamp [10], assessed the literature from 1900 to 2015, and investigated cultural heritage and climate change in relation to geographic scope . https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026644. The list is intended to identify scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated significant community influence through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade. Institutional self-citation rates: A three-year study of universities in the United States. Bornmann, L., Adams, J., & Leydesdorff, L. (2018). We also thank an anonymous referee for their comments regarding the typicality of highly-cited researchers. In this paper we report our investigations as to whether there is a typical or normal range of self-citation for each of 21 discipline-based fields employed in Essential Science Indicators (ESI: these are listed in the Appendix Table1) and we describe a graphical test for significant outliers. Another baseline measure is the all-years citation rate, which is the citation rate for a 10-year period. Soares, J. Some remarks on elitism in information and the invisible college phenomenon in science. Results The search identified 296 articles of reporting guidelines . JIF is a commonly used surrogate to determine journal excellence and is calculated by dividing number of citations in the current year for articles published in the previous two years by total number of articles published in that journal during the previous two years [21]. For example, the top decile of author self-citation could be within normal range for some fields and yet not for others. Scientometrics,59(1), 6377. Each discipline makes an equal contribution to the metric, which eliminates differences in researcher citation behavior. [30], In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, Universit de Montral, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science proposed citation distributions metrics as alternative to impact factors. Ioannidis, J. P. A., Baas, J., Klavans, R., & Boyack, K. W. (2019). 2006; Thijs and Glnzel 2006; Glnzel 2008) and others (Aksnes 2003; Hyland 2003; Fowler and Aksnes 2007; van Raan 2008; Costas et al. In a graphical analysis, the location of the outliers is readily compared to the location (and shape) of the inter-quartile range as a ready indicator of the degree of departure from typical behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21042. Frontiers journals improved their Journal Impact Factor ranking in 30 out of 39 categories in the 2021 Journal Citation Report. 2016; Heneberg 2016; Fong and Wilhite 2017; Zaggl 2017; Scarpa et al. Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? Reviewing the literature The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. Average citations increased from 3.9 in 2019 to 4.8 in 2020 for every article published with us. Larivive, V., Gingras, Y., Sugimoto, C. R., & Tsou, A. Each graph includes Q1, Median, Q3 and the lower and upper thresholds (set at 1.5 and 3 times the inter-quartile range, IQR) for indicative outliers (see Fig. N=1.5 in this equation). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000018535.99885.e9. With three journals each from eight fields, a total of 24 journals were selected (Table 1). 2019; Simoes and Crespo 2020). Garfield, E. (1979). . What do citation counts measure? & Wilhite, A. W. (2017). Journals, especially to game the impact factor (Rousseau 1999; Frandsen 2007; Yu and Wang 2007; Campanario 2011; Wilhite and Fong 2012; Yu et al. & Thombs, B. D. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/030631277500500403. The simplest journal-level metric is the journal impact factor (JIF), the average number of citations that articles published by a journal in the previous two years have received in the current year, as calculated by Clarivate. In the coming months, while researchers scrambled to learn more about the coronavirus that was now spreading internationally, the WHO again released a bulletin on March 11, 2020, officially classifying Covid-19 as a global pandemic [3]. It takes into account the year of publication, document type and disciplines associated with its source. The question is pertinent because self-citation has featured in recent publications that address the possible misrepresentation of research performance by individuals and, specifically, attempts to game citation scores (Baccini et al. Cap Rates will be higher or lower for individual properties depending upon the size, class and location of the property within the MSA. It is measured each year by the Web of Science Group and reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). received by all papers in all fields published during the 10-year period divided Some of these limitations include: For a high-level overview of normalized metrics and their limitations, see: For an overview of the RCR and how it's calculated, see: Hutchins BI, Yuan X, Anderson JM, Santangelo GM. The number of researchers selected for the field is based on the square root of the population of unique authors listed on the fields highly cited papers (Price 1971; Egghe 1987). The problem will arise if cronyism occurs only in isolated instances. Two common field normalized citation metrics types include the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) from iCite and Field Weighted Citation Impact from Scopus. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,22(2), 7475. To our knowledge, this study is the first to quantify the rate at which a large volume of peer-reviewed Covid-19 articles are being cited, on average, in major medical journals and compare these results to non-Covid-19 articles in the same journals. For simplicity of the As with all bibliometric indicators, field variation is significant, so much depends on field definition and the alignment of individuals and their work. between 2008 and the present. Snyder, H., & Bonzi, S. (1998). A variety of values for N may be considered, where a low threshold would be more exclusive, delineating a relatively large proportion of researchers to be reviewed, and a high threshold would be conservative, maximising inclusiveness and focussing only on extreme outliers. Highly cited papers are defined for this purpose as those in the top 1% by citations in their ESI field and for their year of publication. Linear plots by Essential Science Indicators field of the pattern of self-referencing to earlier papers by Highly Cited Researchers identified by analysing Web of Science data for 20082018 and to (self-citing from later publications) highly cited papers on which a researcher is also an author or co-author. (2015). (2013). Scientometrics,87(1), 8598. [47] Two reasons for this are that many of the top-cited journals today are still only hybrid OA (author has the option to pay for gold)[48] and many pure author-pays OA journals today are either of low quality or downright fraudulent "predatory journals," preying on authors' eagerness to publish-or-perish, thereby lowering the average citation counts of OA journals.[49]. Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Meoli, M., & Malighetti, P. (2019). Self-citations at the meso and individual levels: Effects of different calculation methods. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.45374. Space Science has an exceptional level of self-referencing, which is presumably also a consequence of the nature of research in that area. When negative binomial regression is used to minimize the influence of other variables such as article number variation and field of research, Covid-19 papers have still experienced more than 80% increase in citations relative to non-Covid-19 papers. The norms of citation behavior: Prolegomena to the footnote. The negative binomial regression model was selected over a linear regression model because it resulted in a better fit to the data and was more appropriate for count data. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.12.004. 2015; Galvez 2017; Hyland and Jiang 2018; Mishra et al. On the skewness of journal self-citations and publisher self-citations: Cues for discussion from a case study. MLA Formatting Quotations - Purdue OWL - Purdue University https://doi.org/10.4033/iee.2014.7.1.e. Scientometrics,94(2), 777780. Minasny, B., Hartemink, A. E., & McBratney, A. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0703-z. We agree with a possible criticism that the group of researchers analysed here may not be wholly representative of their field since they are generally likely to be more experienced in building a substantial portfolio of well-cited publications. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06142. The authors are employees of the Institute for Scientific Information, which is a part of Clarivate Analytics, the owners of the Web of Science Group. CiteScore metrics are freely available on Scopus - Elsevier Thijs, B., & Glnzel, W. (2006). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2018.mar.03. Journal of Education and Social Policy,2, 7579. The patterns of self-citation rates suggest a very broad cultural consensus about the balance between building on ones own work and recognising the influence of others. (2019). Journal of the American Society for Information Science,37(1), 3436. 2). Whilst in Sociology the number of references, the article length, and title length are among the factors. Citation rates are heavily dependent on the discipline and the number of people working in that area. See Tables1, 2 and 3; Figs. 46(1) 118-130 The Author(s) 2019 . Average Citation - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24046. demonstration of the calculation all papers are in the same year, but in reality, baselines are also calculated for each year. For example, it has been shown that the number of citations received by a publication, once properly rescaled by its average across articles published in the same discipline and in the same year, follows a universal log-normal distribution that is the same in every discipline. The AWCR is very useful, but it only works if publishers enter the dates of their online materials correctly. For instance, many more scientists work in neuroscience than in mathematics, and neuroscientists publish more papers than mathematicians, hence neuroscience papers are much more often cited than papers in mathematics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,60(6), 12831285. A baseline is the average performance of a global set of publications with the same subject area, document type and year. [24], An alternative approach to measure a scholar's impact relies on usage data, such as number of downloads from publishers and analyzing citation performance, often at article level. Field Normalized Citation Metrics - Impact Metrics - Research Guides at The distribution of the average percentage of references that were to self-papers and citations that were from self-papers for each Highly Cited Researcher was calculated. The change in trajectory close to the lower indicative outlier threshold, combined with a distinct break in the series around 27%, makes it questionable whether the next part of the series is still part of the normal range for the field, or represents a distinct sub-field with higher self-citing, or is indicative of inappropriate citation behaviour. 2018; Baccini et al. Small, H. (2004). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153730. A taxonomy of motives to cite. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,62(2), 230235. Rousseau, R. (1999). The Citation Report feature displays bar charts for the number of items published each year and the number of citations each year, plus counts for the average number of citations per item, the number of citations per year per publication, average number of citations per year per publication, and the H-index. Self-citation as an impact-reinforcing mechanism in the science system. Assessing insularity in global science. Many have observed that the term self-citation is frequently used to mean two different forms or modes of self-mention: self-referencing (cited reference to self within a list in ones own publication); and self-citing (citations from ones own work among all citations to ones publications). Classification method for detecting coercive self-citation in journals. e0271071. In many journals, there was discrepancy between the number of Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles. How frequently are articles in predatory open access journals cited. The following chart shows the differences between Citation Impact of various subject categories. Toward the discovery of citation cartels in citation networks. Figure3 presents clear visual confirmation that the self-referencing rate across most fieldsshown here by rank order of the medianis rather low with a very consistent pattern which includes all but the most-citing three or four fields. Ghiasi, G., Larivire, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2016). ", "The use of journal impact factors and citation analysis in the evaluation of science", "The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index", "Papers with shorter titles get more citations", "Protein measurement with the Folin phenol reagent", "Beat it, impact factor! 237280). Do citations provide a full narrative of meaningful health outcomes? A note on self-citation rates in astronomical papers. (2006). However, very high JIF or CS are often based on a small number of very highly cited papers. 3. The following excerpt from a Citation Rates table reveals that on average, a paper from a Geosciences research field published in 2008 received 9.55 citations, and a paper from an Immunology research field published in 2008 received 20.42 citations. Comparisons between non-Covid-19 and Covid-19 articles including all fields are shown in Table 2. Bensman, S. J., Smolinsky, L. J., & Pudovkin, A. I. Wohlrabe and Birmaier [10] studied the citation . Publications, 8(2), 17. an assay to measure the concentration of proteins, "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas", "Citation Frequency as a Measure of Research Activity and Performance", "Can Researchers Bank on Citation Analysis? It has recently been suggested there may be increasing misrepresentation of research performance by individuals who self-cite inordinately to achieve scores and win rewards. Trends in Ecology & Evolution,23(5), 250252. [54] Field-dependent factors are usually listed as an issue to be tackled not only when comparison across disciplines are made, but also when different fields of research of one discipline are being compared. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23728. Motivations for citations: A comparison of self-citation and citation to others. Cozzens, S. E. (1989). Is the researcher a senior investigator with a long record of publication? In every field, except Mathematics, the median and lower indicative threshold self-citing rates (to the highly cited papers) are lower but more variable than that of the self-referencing (from the highly cited papers) (Fig. Scientometrics,66(1), 7180. The process captured in Fig. Referencing as persuasion. New York, NY: Wiley. Another potential reason for the spike in Covid-19 citations is the exhibited capacity of the virus to mutate rapidly. 2019; Peroni et al. The value of the correlation coefficient was lower in fields with fewer outliers, which suggests these high values drive the correlation, but was still statistically significant. 10-year period may be cited by any other paper published during the same Very importantly, however, the data here and in the Appendix show that in some fields, within the central normal range and below the statistical threshold, there can be a well-populated and unproblematic upper decile and even upper percentile. Michael D. Brandt, The Journal Normalized Citation Impact of a single publication is the ratio of the actual number of citing items to the average citation rate of publications in the same journal in the same year and with the same document type . This number dips only slightly to 82% when the smaller, randomized sample is compared. affiliations represented by the authors of the citing works (academia, industry, government, etc. Establishing Your Author Name and Presence. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,61(7), 15141515. (As noted above: central range is a descriptive, non-technical term used to indicate the consistent plateau of similar Highly Cited Researcher self-citation rates within each field that appears to reflect typical cultural self-citation behaviour.). We found that the WOS database included 76% of the Covid-19 papers contained within the journals themselves. Additionally, citation rate for Covid-19 papers has been assessed previously without direct comparison to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals [20]. In doing this, we demonstrate the sharp contrast between citation rates for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles published in 24 months during the rise and height of the global pandemic. comm.). Schubert, A. The phenomenon of self-citation has long interested bibliometricians, sociologists of science, and scientists and scholars themselves (Kaplan 1965; Meadows and OConnor 1971; Chubin and Moitra 1975; Narin 1976; Tagliacozzo 1977; Porter 1977; Garfield 1979; Lawani 1982; Peritz 1983; Brooks 1985, 1986; Trimble 1986;Merton 1988; MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1989; Bonzi and Snyder 1991; Bott and Hargens 1991, for example). Self-citation and self-reference: Credibility and promotion in academic publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.07.009. Scientometrics 123, 11191147 (2020). Consequently, citation rates should not be interpreted as representing the central tendency of the distribution. II. While our research reveals the substantial degree to which Covid-19 articles are being cited in top journals relative to non-Covid-19 articles, the effect on journals themselves remains to be seen. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology,68(4), 10361047. It is important to recognize that citation counts grow over Studies originating in North America, those with six or more authors, sample sizes > 100, and those that are retrospective or prospective case series are independent predictors of greater citation rates at 6 years in orthopedic spine-specific medical literature. PLoS ONE, 14(9): article number e0221212. The 2020 Journal Impact Factors, published in the 2021 Journal Citation Report, are based on citations in 2020 to articles published in 2018 and 2019. Bonzi, S., & Snyder, H. W. (1991). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20868. The 10-year average for Geosciences papers is 9.54, and for Immunology papers it is 20.38. Quantity of citations for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles with median and range values across all fields. We thank our ISI colleagues, particularly Ross Potter, Gordon Rogers and Josh Schnell, for their advice and suggestions during the development of this work. 2018; van Raan 2019). [11] By 2014 it had accumulated more than 305,000 citations. 2), Linear plots by Essential Science Indicators field of the pattern of self-citation to highly cited papers authored by Highly Cited Researchers identified by analysing Web of Science data for 20082018 and to (self-citing from later publications) highly cited papers on which a researcher is also an author or co-author. (2010). We estimated the effect of Covid-19 subject on citation counts using a negative binomial regression model. For the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers analysis, the papers included in the preliminary data development were those published and cited during 20082018. *Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers Neuroscience journal series, in the Neuroscience subject area (CiteScore 2020 edition). The extent to which Covid-19 papers are being cited in selected top journals relative to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals has yet to be explored in detail. Article Consequently, it would not be universally true that a particular percentile across a field-specific range is necessarily caused by undue self-citation: it may simply be a relatively high value within normal range in that field. By contrast the calculation of a self-citation rate divides all citations to self by all citations received from self and others, and both accumulate over time. What do citations count? We would estimate that as Covid-19 papers continue to flood the literature across all scientific fields, so long as Covid-19 continues to hold the global spotlight, Covid-19 papers will continue to be cited, on average, at much higher levels than non-Covid-19 papers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,102(46), 1656916572. However, the use of non-article-level metrics to determine the impact of a single article is statistically invalid. The graph below depicts the percentile rank of Frontiers journals (blue dots) in their respective JCR category. Science and technology in a democratic order. Aksnes, D. W. (2003). American Documentation,16(3), 179184. (2017). Essential Science Indicators: Average Citation Rates - Clarivate https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023117738903. *Neurosciences: The ranking is calculated from total citations for all journals in the Frontiers Neuroscience journal series, in the Neuroscience subject area (JCR 2021 update). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090160305. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016070029935. `Amongst all fields, only articles categorized as Medicine, General, or Internal according to WOS see a bump (28%) in citation rates that can be attributed to the field itself. [53] Their analysis identifies universal impact metrics, such as the field-normalized h-index. Your parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark. Yu, G., & Wang, L. (2007). A FWCI greater than 1.00 means the article is more cited than expected according to the average. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0161021. Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2018). This term is used to denote any fixed fraction of top papers ordered by citation count. A., Bresciani, K., Ramos, T., De Matos, L., Castellane, P., & Cerdeira, M. (2015). Arxiv preprint. Field weighted citation impact (FWCI) is calculated by dividing the total number of citations an article has received the year it was published and 3 complete calendar years after its publication by the average number of citations articles of the same field, publication type, and publication year are expected to receive within the same time period. Ideas in Ecology and Evaluation,7(1), 12. Cities With the Highest Price-to-Rent Ratios: Where Renting Is More Favorable Than Buying. Citation metrics are widely used and misused. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090140304. A high level of self-citation may also reflect a certain insularity in terms of area of investigation, but what it does not signal is broad or community-wide influence (MacRoberts and MacRoberts 1989; van Raan 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel et al. Amidst all of this, there has been an explosion of peer-reviewed literature about Covid-19 as researchers work to uncover details such as structure, infectivity, spread, effects, prevention, and treatment of this novel virus. Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. By the end of January, more than 50 research papers had been published about the outbreak [2]. 2019); and, 5%, using author self-citation (Kacem et al. The false myth of the rise in self-citations, and the impressively positive effect of bibliometric evaluations on the increase of the impact of Italian research.
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