Abstract: Scientometric studies on self-citations reveal variety of aspects, like attempted fraud approaching a crime, a self-advertising tool, a standard scientific publication practice that saves space and time by reducing repetitions, and so on up to self-citations being an important element of scientific networking. It seems, however, that self-citation analysis will remain a hot topic for a long time mainly due to its effect on assessment of scientific impact. Therefore, an obvious question that arises is, to what extent self-citations could modify the basic scientometric indicators and indexes, used to perform such assessment. This paper represents an attempt to quantitatively estimate the effect of self-citations on several widely used scientometric indexes (Hirsch’s h, Egghe’s g and Zhang’s e). This has been achieved by incorporating selfcitations into various explicitly given citation-paper rank distributions under more or less realistic assumptions. The latter are deduced making use of well known empirical relationships, based on analyzing a considerable amount of scientometric data. The results obtained contain self-citation corrections for the scientometric indexes, as well as some indications for a ‘normal’ and ‘extraordinary’ self-citation behavior.

Keywords: self-citations, citation-paper rank distributions, scientometric indexes, h-index, g-index, e-index, empirical relationships, scientometric data analysis

ACM Classification Keywords: H. Information Systems, H.2. Database Management, H.2.8. Database applications, subject: Scientific databases; I. Computing methodologies, I.6 Simulation and Modeling, I.6.4. Model Validation and Analysis

Link:

SELF-CITATIONS EFFECT ON SCIENTOMETRIC INDEXES

Vladimir Atanassov, Ekaterina Detcheva

http://www.foibg.com/ijima/vol03/ijima03-01-p07.pdf