How hot are hot papers? The issue of prolificacy and self-citation stacking
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How hot are hot papers? The issue of prolificacy and self-citation stacking Mansour Haghighat1,2 · Javad Hayatdavoudi3 Received: 30 June 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract The nature of self-citation is not unequivocal as it fluctuates across the borders of approbation and condemnation. While it is tenable that scholars tend to build upon and thus appeal to their previous work, excessive self-citation is considered as a likely strategic tool to showcase one’s achievement, inflate citations, and distort bibliometric indices. The present study aimed to explore how self-citation may affect hot paper designation in Web of Science (WoS) in a short-term citation window. To this end, we studied the self-citation behavior of the authors contributing a sample of hot papers in a select number of journals over two consecutive periods. The cited and citing papers were analyzed in terms of synchronous and diachronous self-citations as well as co-authorship and co-citation networks. The results showed that self-citation evidently proved problematic in as short a citation window of hot papers as two months. The results also suggested that including too many cited references in a given article might be a potential strategy to inflate citations. Thus, we suggest that hot paper designation should assume sensitivity to self-citation, or at least, excessive self-citations by either ruling them out or setting limits on how often an author can reasonably cite earlier works. Still, this is not an attempt at policing excessive self-citation practice of a group of authors and by no means intends to criticize the authors; rather, we aimed to cite an example of how excessive self-citation practice may distort the original agenda of a bibliometric designation in WoS, hot papers. Keywords Self-citation · Hot paper · Web of science · Co-citation · Co-author · Co-word
Introduction Citations are the building blocks of the mansion of bibliometrics and a primary source for the quantitative studies of science. The majority of bibliometric measures hinge on the pivot of citations and citation analyses. Therefore, they have always been a subject of * Javad Hayatdavoudi [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, School of Sciences, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
2
Deputy for Research Affairs, ISC, Shiraz, Iran
3
Department of Analysis of Resources, ISC, Shiraz, Iran
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Scientometrics
heated debate. Citations may be considered as the measure of scientific impact or usefulness to the scientific community. Citations may be broadly categorized into foreign and self-citations: the former being earned by an entity from another source and the latter being given by an entity to its own work. With regard to self-citation, there has been an ongoing argument in the scholarly literature as to its typologies, functions, and impact. The significance and functionalities of self-citation is not negligible so that citation databases such as Web of Science (WoS) report total citation counts of a given se
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