Research Article (preprint): “A Global Exploratory Comparison of Country Self-Citations 1996-2019”

The article linked below (preprint) was recently shared on arXiv.

Title

A Global Exploratory Comparison of Country Self-Citations 1996-2019

Authors

Alberto Baccini
University of Siena, Italy

Eugenio Petrovich
University of Turin, Italy
Tilburg University, the Netherlands

Source

via arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2303.0809

Abstract

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.

Direct to Full Text Article
42 pages; PDF.

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