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.

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See Also: Author-ity: Tools for Identifying Medline Articles Written by a Particular Author

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