Self-citation and its impact on scientific workflow assessment: The review of publications. Part I

Abstract

The author reviews publications on the problem of self-citation and resulting mispresentations at the stage bibliometric analysis. He introduces the definition of self-citation and its special cases, i. e. author’s, institutional, publisher’s and disciplinary. The formulas for general self-citation metrics, i. e. self-citation and self-citedness coefficients, are provided. The global publications on author’s, institutional, national and journal self-citation are reviewed thoroughly. The current concepts of the role and impact of self-citation on scientific activity assessment are generalized. On the basis of his analytical review, the author argues that the researchers obtain consensus on several aspects, e. g.: а) excessive and absent self-citation are both seen as pathologies; в) self-citation has insignificant impact on large research entities though this influence can be critical when analyzing contributions by individual authors; с) self-citation impact is well-expressed for scientific entities with weak bibliometric indicators, while the top scientists, organizations, journals, etc., get most of external links. The author examines the response of bibliometric indicators and databases to self-citation manipulations to adjust the indicators.Part I of the review is intended to define the basic concepts and terms and to examine the most popular author’s self-citation.