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Scientific impact of an author and role of self-citations

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Abstract

In bibliometric and scientometric research, the quantitative assessment of scientific impact has boomed over the past few decades. Citations, being playing a major role in enhancing the impact of researchers, have become a very significant part of a plethora of new techniques for measuring scientific impact. Self-citations, though can be used genuinely to credit someone’s own work, can play a significant role in artificial manipulation of scientific impact. In this research, we study the impact of self-citations on enhancing the scientific impact of an author using a dataset retrieved from AMiner ranging from 1936 to 2014 from the computer science domain. We investigated the relations among trends of self-citation and their influence on scientific impact. We also studied its influence on ranking metrics including author impact factor and H-Index. By analyzing self-citations over time, we discover five basic self-citation trends, which are early, middle, later, multi and none. Distinctly different patterns were observed in self-citations trends. The results show that self-citations, if totally removed from total received citations, negatively influence the AIF and H-Index values and hence can be used to artificially boost the scientific impact. We used regression-based prediction models to predict the influence of self-citations on future H-Index. Classifiers including Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes and K-NN were used with an accuracy of 93%, 73% and 60% respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, International Islamic University, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Tehmina Amjad, Yusra Rehmat & Ali Daud

  2. Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

    Ali Daud

  3. Department of Computer Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi

Authors
  1. Tehmina Amjad
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  2. Yusra Rehmat
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  3. Ali Daud
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  4. Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi
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Correspondence to Tehmina Amjad.

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Amjad, T., Rehmat, Y., Daud, A. et al. Scientific impact of an author and role of self-citations. Scientometrics 122, 915–932 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03334-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03334-2

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