Note that we are excluding citations from 2017, as RCRs exclude the first calendar year in which the article was published. Citation benchmarking shows how citations received by this article compare with the average for similar articles. When comparing Covid-19 papers and the 1:1 randomized sample of non-Covid-19 papers, the median citation decreases from 21.63 to 20.1 for non-Covid-19 citations and the citation ratio between Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 papers climbs to 6.01 (p = <0.001). Like all impact metrics, vulnerable to gamification (e.g.. Thus, more funding opportunities are available at the researcher level for research that focuses on Covid-19. Measuring research. The average citation per article for these publications was 8.1. Journal of Informetrics,12(3), 931949. [10], The most-cited paper in history is a paper by Oliver Lowry describing an assay to measure the concentration of proteins. Leblond, M. (2012). It should be obvious that citations (to older papers) come from references (in newer papers) and that the totals of references and cites are the same, but it is less obvious that the distributions differ. These "tweetations" proved to be a good indicator of highly cited articles, leading the author to propose a "Twimpact factor", which is the number of Tweets it receives in the first seven days of publication, as well as a Twindex, which is the rank percentile of an article's Twimpact factor. The Highly Cited Researchers review procedure has the goal of identifying community-wide influence and its focus is the extent of self-citing rather than self-referencing, but both are examined for each putative selectee. The other side of the coin: The intricacies of author self-citations. Social Forces,74(2), 379422. PubMedGoogle Scholar. Furthermore, publication and citation data are universally skewed and we will show that this is true of the range of self-citation rates across researchers. For all years, Microbiology papers in the 10% percentile received a minimum of 38 citations. Web of Science provides evidence of collaboration with other scientists and institutions, publication productivity, cited-by works, the h-index and also includes tools for creating citation maps. Self-citation by researchers: Narcissism or an inevitable outcome of a cohesive and sustained research program? https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2008.01.009. Citation indexing: Its theory and application in science, technology, and humanities. Does self-citation pay? Journal of the American Society for Information Science,40(5), 342349. Scientometrics,117(2), 9971022. What do citations count? The ethos of science and its correlates: An empirical analysis of scientists endorsement of Mertonian norms. 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. Calculating Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI). Other companies report similar metrics, such as the CiteScore (CS), based on Scopus. 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. The total citation impact, mean citation impact and the factors contributing to 2-year and 5-year citation rate were established. Niyazov, Y., Vogel, C., Price, R., Lund, B., Judd, D., Akil, A., & Shron, M. (2016). Note that we are excluding citations from 2017, as RCRs exclude the first calendar year in which the article was published. 237280). The concept of self-citation (self-referencing or self-citation) can also be defined narrowly or broadly, that is, including or not including coauthors (Snyder and Bonzi 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel et al. These data are therefore susceptible to a thorough quantitative analysis that is unaffected by small-number effects among papers or cites for any single cluster. They are not statistical tests but point to rather than definitively identifying possible cases of excessive self-citation. Communism, universalism and disinterestedness: Re-examining contemporary support among academics for Mertons scientific norms. 4 (self-citing) and in the Appendix (Table2: self-referencing and Table3: self-citing) as linear data for ready interpretation of percentages. The citation rate for all years is the total number of citations received by all papers in all fields published during the 10-year period divided by the total number of papers. 2019). Publishing elite turns against controversial metric", "Prestigious Science Journals Struggle to Reach Even Average Reliability", "Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges", "ASM Journals Eliminate Impact Factor Information from Journal Websites", "Universality of Citation Distributions for Academic Institutions and Journals", "A citation-based, author- and age-normalized, logarithmic index for evaluation of individual researchers independently of publication counts", "An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output", "Handling self-citations using Google Scholar", "Citation classics published in knowledge management journals. ISBN 978-84-9048-519-4. In I. Rafols, J. Molas-Gallart, E. Castro-Martinez & R. Woolley (Eds. Previous studies have looked at citation rates for preprints of Covid-19 papers [17] and quality of evidence contained within published Covid-19 articles [18, 19]. (2012). Tahamtan, I., & Bornmann, L. (2019). Science Technology & Society,23(1), 124. Lawani, S. M. (1982). In our sample, the database captured about three-quarters of the papers that should be included but is more precise in labeling only reports of research on original work as Article. A younger person with few publications would not generally exhibit high rates of self-citation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,37(1), 3436. Such considerations stem from the Mertonian notion of a citation as a repayment of an intellectual debt, which in turn provides reward in the form of community recognition to those so credited (Small 2004). Field normalized citation metrics are an article level metric. bioRxiv preprint, December 23, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1101/2019.12.20.884031. Scientometrics,59(3), 281310. Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. Cumulative advantage and the symbolism of intellectual property. The journal citation reports (SCI edition) with and without journal self-citations. Note, however, that the expected rate of author self-citation for this group is likely to be lower than for researchers in general owing to the high levels of citation (Highly Cited Researchers are at the end of the distribution driven by the laws of cumulative advantage: Price 1976; van Raan 2008). Narin (1976) saw another possible method for manipulating the citation record: If citation analysis becomes an accepted, universal method of evaluating research utilization, scientists may conspire with their colleagues to cite one another to effect an increase in their individual citation counts. ESI Data Schubert, A., Glnzel, W., & Thijs, B. Journal of Information Science,24(6), 431435. Detecting h-index manipulation through self-citation analysis. Baselines are calculated using a whole counting method, this means that all papers in a subject area are counted towards the baseline calculation regardless of whether those papers are also in other subject areas or not. Aksnes, D. W., Langfeldt, L. & Wouters, P. (2019). https://doi.org/10.22452/mjlis.vol22no1.1. At least 2 years of . Problems of citation analysis: A critical review. King, M. M., Bergstrom, C. T., Correll, S. J., Jacquet, J., & West, J. D. (2017). Some characteristics of citing works that can be used for narrative purposes include: The inherent assumption is that significant publications will demonstrate a high citation count. If you score a 1060, that means you're slightly above the 50th percentile: about half of the people taking the test scored higher than you and half scored lower. 2), Log 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. Bakare, V., & Lewison, G. (2017). Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Meoli, M., & Malighetti, P. (2019). ScienceDirect is a database that contains over 25% of the worlds science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information (journals and books) published by Elsevier and other publishers. Separate data are shown for career-long and single . 2022 Frontiers Media S.A. All Rights Reserved. https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.45374. Yu, T., Yu, G., & Wang, M. Y. How much is too much? Of the 10 cities in our study where buying is more favorable than renting, five are in the Midwest. American Sociologist,22(2), 147158. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2144-6. useful reference points for comparison and they are the basis of normalization to overcome subject bias. Many other measures have been proposed, beyond simple citation counts, to better quantify an individual scholar's citation impact. So the RCR would be 9 citations per year / 6 citations per year = 1.5. Thus, data include a combination of open-access and subscription-based publications in the non-Covid-19 articles. If, therefore, a self-citation is interpreted primarily as self-reward, the distance to self-promotion is not far away, and that behavior rubs up against the norm of disinterestedness which proscribes self-aggrandizement (Merton 1942). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science,23(2), 2546. Social Studies of Science,5(1), 8692. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0187-7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03243-4. Elsevier Scopus provides traditional citation counts, the Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and benchmarking. 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. New York, NY. Identifying community-wide influence is a central, though not sole, focus of the work that led to this paper, as will be described below. These data are also summarised in the Appendix Table2. PsycINFO offers a Cited Reference tool that allows for location of cited works indexed in PsycINFO. Collnet Journal of Scientometrics and Information Management,2(1), 917. Scientometrics,82(3), 517537. The graph below depicts the percentile rank of Frontiers journals (blue dots) in their respective JCR category. Author self-citations in the field of ecology. volume123,pages 11191147 (2020)Cite this article. For each field: The following excerpt from a Field Rankings table reveals that in the field of Engineering: There are records of 919,038 papers from Engineering journals in 10 years of. Hirsch, J. E. (2005). Scopus is considered by many to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis and journal ranking statistics.. Schubert, A. The self-cited rate of scientific journals and the manipulation of their impact factors. Recent publications exhibit lower citation impact due to the fact that older papers have [22] Counting the number of citations per paper is also employed to identify the authors of citation classics. These rates of self-citation are evidently much lower than those of self-referencing, as expected for Highly Cited Researchers because their broad peer influence attracts many cites from others (van Raan 2008), and they are relatively more variable between fields compared to self-referencing. 2019; Seeber et al. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology,66(9), 19231932. Through this selection process, over 6000 researchers were recognized: 3517 within the 21 ESI fields; and 2491 in the additional cross-field category created to recognize equivalent contributions across several fields. For example, if the value of the 1.00% percentile is 15, a paper in the same research field in the same year must receive at least 15 citations to belong to that percentile. This is most easily interpreted on the linear plot, whereas statistical sense would suggest that the data should be log-plotted because of the skewed negative binomial distribution. (2008). The linear thresholds were therefore plotted on the log-plots rather than calculating a log-normal value which would have been very inclusive with few indicative outliers. [51][52] Kaur et al. PLOS ONE, 11(2), e0148257. 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]. Orvosi Hetilap,157(32), 12891293. Quantity of citations for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 articles with median and range values across all fields. https://doi.org/10.1556/Scient.67.2006.2.8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.025. 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). e0271071. from any single year between 2008 and the present. [31][32][33], Open access (OA) publications are accessible without cost to readers, hence they would be expected to be cited more frequently. PLoS ONE 17(7): https://doi.org/10.1080/09737766.2008.10700836. Thus, we can consider the core referencing behaviour of the overall group of Highly Cited Researchers, as research leaders, to be in accordance with precedents previously established. Scientometrics,120(2), 775791. Sage Open, 9(1), article number 2158244019829575. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019829575. Geosciences papers is 9.54, and for Immunology papers it is 20.38. Research suggests the impact of an article can be, partly, explained by superficial factors and not only by the scientific merits of an article. [55] For instance in Medicine among other factors the number of authors, the number of references, the article length, and the presence of a colon in the title influence the impact. Discover a faster, simpler path to publishing in a high-quality journal. Gender variations in citation distribution in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige. It is evident that the modal self-reference share is around 57% and the modal self-citation count is less than 5%, but this will be shown to vary by field. Not to be confused with. 2016; King et al. Any paper published in the The distributions of the average percentage of a self-references in highly cited papers and b self-citations from highly cited papers for 3517 Highly Cited Researchers identified in the Web of Science for 20082018 publications. 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017571. In a study based on the Web of Science database across 118 scientific disciplines, the top 1% most-cited authors accounted for 21% of all citations. 2018); about 13% as a median, using co-author self-citation (Ioannidis et al. More radical approaches would identify more of the researchers close to but above the high end of the central range as requiring investigation, but this could perhaps also enable a focus on individual cases where an unusually high rate of self-cites may be justifiable for topic-specific reasons. (608) 262-2020 Arxiv preprint. In response, the scientific field has dedicated enormous amounts of resources to researching the virus and its effects. Automated citation indexing[58] has changed the nature of citation analysis research, allowing millions of citations to be analyzed for large scale patterns and knowledge discovery. Detecting impact factor manipulation with data mining techniques. More recently, advanced models for a dynamic analysis of citation aging have been proposed. Reasons behind the major increase in citations for Covid-19 articles seem straightforward. Citation analysis is the examination of citing works to an individual work (or a group of works). https://doi.org/10.2307/2089193. Additionally, citation rate for Covid-19 papers has been assessed previously without direct comparison to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals [20]. Article Social Studies of Science,7(2), 257267. The disciplines chosen were respiratory, cardiology, immunology, radiology, microbiology, gastroenterology and hepatology, general and internal medicine, and multidisciplinary sciences. Scientometrics 123, 11191147 (2020). An updated review of studies on citations in scientific documents published between 2006 and 2018. The 10-year average for If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Because of the skew in such a distribution, an issue arises concerning the application of standard tests for data outliers. Costas, R., van Leeuwen, T. N., & Bordons, M. (2010). PMC offers a feature that allows for location of citing works in PMC. Using a negative regression model to analyze the entire data, Covid-19 papers have 84% more citations than non-Covid-19 papers when controlling for field and article number discrepancies. dividing the total number of citations received by all papers in the group Ramanathan D. Kadirvel, Affiliation: 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. demonstration of the calculation all papers are in the same year, but in reality, baselines are also calculated for each year. The Matthew effect in science. edu. Scientometrics,54(2), 285290. To address this gap in the literature we use WOS to examine citation rates for Covid-19-related articles published between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2021 across 24 major scientific journals. This final point is important because it changes our focus for the future. The h-index and self-citations. 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. Is the researcher a senior investigator with a long record of publication? Reasons for self-citation include: the cumulative nature of individual research, the need for personal gratification, or the value of self-citation as a rhetorical and tactical tool in the struggle for visibility and scientific authority (Fowler and Aksnes 2007). Yang, D. H., Li, X., Sun, X. X., & Wan, J. 6, 7, 8 and 9. Shehatta, I., & Al-Rubaish, A. M. (2019). Or is the management of the journals also a problem? 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). This suggests that journal impact factor, which is a product of the number of citations that recently published articles receive, will likely be drastically influenced by the number of Covid-19 papers that a journal has included within its pages in the previous years. Scientometrics, 79(1), 147-156. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, article number UNSP e13151. The rhetoric-first model. Are sociologists publications uncited? https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000045117.13348.b1. arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4566. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631277500500106. Impact than biochemistry & molecular biology. Any paper published in the 10-year period may be cited by any other paper published during the same period. Chubin, D. E., & Moitra, S. D. (1975). (2016). World flash on basic research: The influence of author self-citations on bibliometric macro indicators. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02016632. Minasny, B., Hartemink, A. E., & McBratney, A. Manipulation of explicit reputation in innovation and knowledge exchange communities: The example of referencing in science. Content analysis of references: Adjunct or alternative to citation counting. Science,335(6068), 542543. Gilbert, N. G. (1977). The combination of a long bibliography of papers published in obscure journals and an abnormally high self-citation count would make the intent so obvious that the technique would be self-defeating (Garfield 1979).