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Self-citations are a key topic in evaluative bibliometrics because they can artificially inflate citation-related performance indicators. Recently, self-citations defined at the largest scale, i.e., country self-citations, have started to attract the attention of researchers and policymakers. According to a recent research, in fact, the anomalous trends in the country self-citation rates of some countries, such as Italy, have been induced by the distorting effect of citation metrics-centered science policies. In the present study, we investigate the trends of country self-citations in 50 countries over the world in the period 1996-2019 using Scopus data. Results show that for most countries country self-citations have decreased over time. 12 countries (Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Ukraine), however, exhibit different behavior, with anomalous trends of self-citations. We argue that these anomalies should be attributed to the aggressive science policies adopted by these countries in recent years, which are all characterized by direct or indirect incentives for citations. Our analysis confirms that when bibliometric indicators are integrated into systems of incentives, they are capable of affecting rapidly and visibly the citation behavior of entire countries.
Copyright: 2023 Baccini, Petrovich. 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.
In the most general sense, self-citation occurs when an entity (e.g., an author, journal, institution, or country) receives a citation from a publication produced by the same entity [15]. Even if all self-citations derive from the act of self-referencing, self-citations and self-references should be distinguished [16]. For technical reasons shortly described below, the results derived from observing self-citations or self-references are different and so is their interpretation. This paper focuses on country self-citations.
The paper is structured as follows. In the next section, the bibliometric indicators based on country self-citations are reviewed. Then, the indicators, data, and analytical methods used in this study (time-series analysis) are presented. The main findings are shown in the Results section, whereas, in the Discussion section, we focus on countries characterized by anomalous self-citation trends. Based on the detailed reconstruction of the research policies adopted by these countries, it is argued that the anomalous trends are most likely explained by the adaptive response of scientists to the systems of incentives established by the policies themselves. Accordingly, Conclusions suggest managing bibliometric indicators in research policy contexts with extreme caution.
As anticipated, self-citations and self-references are defined, computed, and interpreted in different ways. To highlight these differences [39], for example, called the former diachronous or prospective self-citations and the latter synchronous or retrospective self-citations.
Self-citations can be defined as citations from citing sources to cited items that are both produced by (at least) the same entity E, i.e. the same author, journal, institution, or country. Different ways of defining these entities entail the use of different algorithms, which will be discussed in the next paragraph.
Self-references indicate as well citations from citing sources to cited items that are both produced by (at least) the same entity, but the sets of citing sources and cited items are defined in different ways with respect to self-citations. Moreover, the computation of self-reference requires only a publication window for the set of citing sources. If the publication window is set also at one year, the cited sources are the publications produced by E in the year y, and cited items are (all or part of) the items listed in the bibliographies of the citing sources. SBE,y, i.e. the number of self-references in the year y, is computed by summing up the citations from citing sources published in the year y by E to cited items previously produced by E. Analogously, RE,y indicates the total number of citations given (i.e., references) by E in the year y to documents published before. The self-reference rate SBRE,y for the year y is thus defined as:(4)
Note that a rigorous definition of this indicator would require the specification of a reference window, analogous to the citation window used in the self-citation rate. The studies based on the self-reference rate (e.g., [16]) usually assume a reference window that is extended to the oldest publication year of the references considered, but, in principle, other reference windows are possible.
When references are observed, the focus of the analysis is on the use of previous knowledge by the entity E, and not on the academic impact of the scientific production of E. It should be noted that the denominator of the ratio is, in this case, produced also by the citing choices of E. SBRE should be interpreted as an indicator of how much E uses in its current work the knowledge that it had previously produced. For instance, for an author, a relatively high value of SBRE,y may indicate that her/his work is largely based on her/his previous work. This in turn may be due to scarce attention to the work of other researchers in the field or to the fact that the author works in a little and specialized niche [39]. A relatively high value of SRE,y, instead, indicates that a relatively high share of her/his academic impact is due to her/his self-citation activity.
Note that, in general, authors have more control over their self-reference rate than their self-citation rate, as they can manage more easily the citations they give (i.e., the denominator of the self-reference rate), than the citations that they receive (i.e., the denominator of the self-citation rate). In fact, authors interested in artificially inflating their citation metrics can effectively conceal strategic self-references within long reference lists and keep their self-reference rate low. Still, if they are not able to attract enough external citations to offset the impact of their strategic self-references, their self-citation rate will inevitably rise. This shows that the self-citation rate is more effective in revealing strategic self-citation behavior than the self-reference rate.
Inwardness is interpreted as a measure of the self-referentiality of a country: a higher level of inwardness suggests that the scientific publications produced by a country attract mainly the interest of the national community, whereas a lower level of inwardness suggests that the scientific production is cited mainly abroad. In the same sense, [42] related country self-citations to the degree of scientific insularity of nations. [42] also suggested several factors that may explain why developing countries show higher self-citation rates, among which a focus on applied scientific issues that respond to the perceived needs of national development, poor referencing practice, insufficient training of graduate students, preference for literature in national language than in English, and the proliferation of low-quality national journals. As [26] have shown, however, also developed countries may show anomalous raises in self-citation rates induced by research evaluation policies that reward raw citation metrics.
The odds-ratio ON,y measures to what extent the country relative preference to cite its own publications is greater or smaller than the existing ratio of its domestic publications to publications from other countries. Note that for small values of SRN,y and αN,y, the odds-ratio approaches the over-citation ratio.
The odds-ratio has three drawbacks as well, however [24]. First, if a country cites only its own publication, the measure is infinite. Second, it is oversensitive to small variations in the SRN,y. Third, it is not normalized between 0 and 1. To fix these issues, [24] proposed the following indicator of relative self-citation rate:(11)
According to their interpretation, this formula considers the publication proportion αN,y as a stimulus to the publication-citation system and the relative self-citation rate EN,y as the subjective reaction of the system, which depends logarithmically on the intensity of the stimulus, as in Weber-Fechner equation. The function also expresses the law of diminishing returns: the larger αN,y, the less important the changes in the relative self-citation rate. The relative self-citation rate has the advantages of being normalized and size-independent. Besides its mathematical merits, however, its meaning is less transparent compared to all the previous alternatives.
As anticipated, this work handles time series analysis of country self-citations: time-series clustering techniques are used for detecting countries whose self-citation behavior is similar [47, 48]. To build the time-series, a preliminary distinction between extensive (or broad) and restrictive (or narrow) country self-citations is introduced. The two counts are conceptually different and generate different estimates of country self-citations. Hence, two self-citation indicators are defined.
The relevant data from a citation database for the countries of interest are next retrieved and the time-series generated. The distance between the time-series is then calculated using a suitable distance measure and the structure of the distance matrix thus obtained is explored using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). In the resulting MDS maps, countries characterized by similar trends will be placed close to each other, whereas countries with different trends far away [49].
As said above, country self-citations can be computed in different ways depending on how self-citations to international publications, i.e. publications with authors from different countries, are considered. Analogously to author self-citations, the count of country self-citations for international publications can be done by adopting a publication-based or a author-based perspective [34].
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