New Research Article: “Self-Citation is the Hallmark of Productive Authors, of Any Gender”
The following article was published today by PLoS One.
Title
Self-Citation is the Hallmark of Productive Authors, of Any Gender
Authors
Shubhanshu Mishra
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Brent D. Fegley
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jana Diesner
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Vetle I. Torvik
School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Source
PLoS One
13(9): e0195773
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195773
Abstract
It was recently reported that men self-cite >50% more often than women across a wide variety of disciplines in the bibliographic database JSTOR. Here, we replicate this finding in a sample of 1.6 million papers from Author-ity, a version of PubMed with computationally disambiguated author names. More importantly, we show that the gender effect largely disappears when accounting for prior publication count in a multidimensional statistical model. Gender has the weakest effect on the probability of self-citation among an extensive set of features tested, including byline position, affiliation, ethnicity, collaboration size, time lag, subject-matter novelty, reference/citation counts, publication type, language, and venue. We find that self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender, who cite their novel journal publications early and in similar venues, and more often cross citation-barriers such as language and indexing. As a result, papers by authors with short, disrupted, or diverse careers miss out on the initial boost in visibility gained from self-citations. Our data further suggest that this disproportionately affects women because of attrition and not because of disciplinary under-specialization.
Direct to Full Text Article
See Also: Author-ity: Tools for Identifying Medline Articles Written by a Particular Author
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.