Abstract
Self-citation is attracting wide attention in citation analysis research and research evaluation practice. However, the academic community’s views on self-citation are not uniform. If the number of self-citations should be calculated, it is critical to calculate it accurately and unambiguously. However, based on a case study of thirty papers published during 2014 and 2020 by the corresponding author of the study, we find that the numbers of self-citations identified through the automatic identification tools provided by Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection are confusing and inconsistent. We also put forward corresponding improvement suggestions to the stakeholders including these two authoritative bibliographic database providers at the end of this article.
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Notes
Data were accessed on May 13th 2020.
For brevity, we only keep the top 5 papers for analysis. Subsequent tables are also processed in a similar way.
https://images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS533JR18/help/WOS/hp_citation_report.html. Accessed on May 14th 2020.
The difference between Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection may due to the accuracy of citation data in both databases (van Eck and Waltman 2017).
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Acknowledgements
This research is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#71801189) and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (#LQ18G030010). All of the views expressed here are those of the authors who also take full responsibility for any errors.
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Li, H., Liu, W. Same same but different: self-citations identified through Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection. Scientometrics 124, 2723–2732 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03573-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03573-8