Paper self-citation: An unexplored phenomenon

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Haunschild, Robin, Bornmann, Lutz
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Haunschild, Robin
Bornmann, Lutz
author_facet Haunschild, Robin
Bornmann, Lutz
contents In this study, we investigated a phenomenon that one intuitively would assume does not exist: self-citations on the paper basis. Actually, papers citing themselves do exist in the Web of Science (WoS) database. In total, we obtained 44,857 papers that have self-citation relations in the WoS raw dataset. In part, they are database artefacts but in part they are due to papers citing themselves in the conclusion or appendix. We also found cases where paper self-citations occur due to publisher-made highlights promoting and citing the paper. We analyzed the self-citing papers according to selected metadata. We observed accumulations of the number of self-citing papers across publication years. We found a skewed distribution across countries, journals, authors, fields, and document types. Finally, we discuss the implications of paper self-citations for bibliometric indicators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Paper self-citation: An unexplored phenomenon
Haunschild, Robin
Bornmann, Lutz
Digital Libraries
In this study, we investigated a phenomenon that one intuitively would assume does not exist: self-citations on the paper basis. Actually, papers citing themselves do exist in the Web of Science (WoS) database. In total, we obtained 44,857 papers that have self-citation relations in the WoS raw dataset. In part, they are database artefacts but in part they are due to papers citing themselves in the conclusion or appendix. We also found cases where paper self-citations occur due to publisher-made highlights promoting and citing the paper. We analyzed the self-citing papers according to selected metadata. We observed accumulations of the number of self-citing papers across publication years. We found a skewed distribution across countries, journals, authors, fields, and document types. Finally, we discuss the implications of paper self-citations for bibliometric indicators.
title Paper self-citation: An unexplored phenomenon
topic Digital Libraries
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04324