Few self-citations among Chilean ecologists
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(2020) 93:9
Revista Chilena de Historia Natural
COMMENTARY
Open Access
Few self-citations among Chilean ecologists Jaime R. Rau1* and Fabian M. Jaksic2
Abstract Background: We determine the occurrence of self-citations among 36 Chilean ecologists with the highest h index values recorded in Web of Science. Because the practice of self-citation is perceived as negative by inflating a given researcher’s impact factor, we evaluate if those ecologists (five of them having been awarded the National Prize in Natural Sciences) tend unduly to self-citation, or alternately, receive citations from others ostensibly because their peers recognize their theoretical and empirical output. Methods and findings: We use a recently proposed self-citation estimate easily calculated from h index values recorded in the restricted-access Web of Science (Wos) database and the open-access Google Scholar’s (GS) Researcher Profiles and compare these metrics. Conclusions: The Chilean ecologists showed low self-citation values, independently of their status as National Prize awardees. Their publications were highly cited by unrelated peers, likely on account of their novelty or quality. Among middle-aged (50–60 year) and young (< 50 year) Chilean ecologists open-access GS h index values are significantly correlated with those from WoS, thus rendering expeditious this method of citation assessment. Keywords: Web of Science, Google Scholar, h-index, self-citations test
Background Self-citations (or auto-citations) are those that an author makes of his/her own previous work, whereas allocitations are those made to work not conducted by a given citing author, neither as leader nor as collaborator [1]. Without penalizing self-citations when they are used to put an author’s line of research in context, when they describe a specific technique or methodology or study site [2], or have lines of research with few practitioners and/or long-term monitoring along a theme [3], it is assumed that the allocites represent a greater impact than the autocites and that the autocites/allocites ratio is lower as the scientometric impact increases [1]. Self-citations are often perceived negatively, as they may convey a misleading impression of a researcher’s impact ([4], and references therein]). In fact, among n = 107 Ecology journals scrutinized, auto-citations accounted for 16.2 ± 1.3% (mean ± SE) of their Impact Factor in 2004 [5]. * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Laboratorio de Ecología, Departamento de Ciencias Biológicas & Biodiversidad, Universidad de Los Lagos, Campus Osorno, Osorno, Chile Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Along the same line, an analysis of the publication output of 120 Chilean ecologists found evidence that self-citations significantly increased h-index values [6]. Here, using a quick-and-efficient (“back of the envelope”) recently proposed metric [4], we evaluate whether a sample of n = 36 Chilean ecologists grouped by age in 3 non-overlapping classes incur in this inflationary practice. Becau
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