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Does co-authorship inflate the share of self-citations?

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Abstract

In recent papers, the authors have studied basic regularities of author self-citations. The regularities are related to the ageing, to the relation between self-citations and foreign citations and to the interdependence of self-citations with other bibliometric indicators. The effect of multi-authorship on citation impact has been shown in other bibliometric studies, for instance, by Persson et al. (2004). The question arises whether those regularities imply any relation between number of co-authors and the extent of author self-citations. The results of the present paper confirm the common notion of such effects only in part. The authors show that at the macro level multi-authorship does not result in any exaggerate extent of self-citations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Steunpunt O&O Statistieken Dekenstraat 2, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Wolfgang Glänzel

  2. Steunpunt O&O Statistieken, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Leuven, (Belgium)

    Bart Thijs

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  1. Wolfgang Glänzel
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  2. Bart Thijs
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Glänzel, W., Thijs, B. Does co-authorship inflate the share of self-citations?. Scientometrics 61, 395–404 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000045117.13348.b1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000045117.13348.b1

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