Impact of country self citation on the ranking of the top 50 countries in clinical neurology

Abstract

Objectives To examine the factors that influence country self-citation rate (SCR) in clinical neurology and to assess the impact of self-citation on the ranking of the top 50 countries. Methods SCImago Journal & Country Rank was used to collect data for the 50 most cited countries in clinical neurology during 1996–2019. Country SCR was correlated with several productivity parameters and examined statistically. Countries that dropped in their ranking after the exclusion of self-citations were identified. Results The median (range) country SCR for the 50 most cited countries was 11.3%. (5.3%- 47%). Country SCR correlated significantly with total citable documents and total cites numbers and rankings. The exclusion of self-citations led to a drop in the ranking of 8(16%) countries only. No significant difference between the total and net total cites rankings was observed. Conclusions Self-citation can be appropriate and reflect an expansion on earlier research. Highly cited productive countries tend to have high country SCR. Excluding self-citations had minimal impact on the ranking of the top 50 countries. Our findings indicate that self-citation is unlikely to influence country standing amongst the top 50 and does not support the argument for eliminating self-citations from citation-based metrics. A more globalization through international collaboration in research is encouraged.

Trends in Self-citation Rates in High-impact Neurology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry Journals

“…This analysis is distinct from country self-citation rate because we calculated self-citation at the level of the author, then averaged across countries. In contrast, previous studies have operationalized country self-citation rates as when authors from one country cite other authors from the same country 19 . The results are shown on a map of the world using GeoPandas 20 (Figure 3; see Methods) and also presented in table format (Table S3).…”

What makes an orthopaedic paper highly citable? A bibliometric analysis of top orthopeadic journals with 10‐year follow up

“…However, Wu et al highlighted the fact that China is exerting an ever-increasing influence on science and currently publishes the most research papers [ 42 ]. Although the US is one of the countries with the highest self-citation counts, [ 4 , 43 ] the work of Bardeesi et al concludes that these self-citations have little impact on the overall picture and therefore does not support the call by many scientists to exclude self-citations.…”

A global exploratory comparison of country self-citations 1996-2019

“…where c E (y, y − 1 + i) is the number of citations received by the set of cited items published by E in the publication window y, from citing sources published in the citation window y − 1 + i. The basic indicator is the self-citation rate (SR E , y) for entity E in the year y, defined as the ratio between the self-citations and the total number of citations received by E [26,28,40,41]:…”

“…In the context of the study of the scientific performance of countries, the self-citations defined at the highest level of aggregation, i.e., country self-citations, have recently started to attract some attention, both from researchers [26][27][28][29][30][31] and in science policy reports [32]. A country self-citation, also called sometimes domestic citation (e.g., [33]), occurs when the publications produced by the researchers of a country are subsequently cited by researchers of the same country.…”