Self citation
A self-citation is a reference an author provide in a document to other documents written by himself. Self-references may result from the cumulative nature of individual research, the need for personal gratification, or the value of self-citation as a rhetorical and tactical tool in the struggle for visibility and scientific authority.
Author self-citation is of interest to Library and Information Science (LIS) for what it reveals about the publishing behavior of individuals and their relationships within academic networks. Therefore a literature about this phenomenon has grown up.
Hyland (2003) finds that while this research has produced interesting insights, it typically assumes either that self-citation is a neutral form of reporting not unlike references to others' work or an unsavory kind of academic egotism. By examining self-citation in a wider context of self-mention, however, the phenomenon can be seen as part of a more comprehensive rhetorical strategy for emphasizing a writer's personal contribution to a piece of research and strengthening his or her knowledge claims, research credibility, and wider standing in the discipline. These meanings are not easily revealed through quantitative bibliometric methods and require careful text analyses and discourse-based interviews with academics. In his paper, Hyland explores the use of self-citation and authorial mention in a corpus of 240 research articles and 800 abstracts in eight disciplines. Through an analysis of these texts and interviews with expert informants he shows how self-mention is used and the ways these uses reflect both the promotional strategies of individuals and the epistemological practices of their disciplines.
The concept of self-citation is not only used about individual authors, but also, for example, about journals (cf., Pichappan, 1995).
Literature:
Hyland, K. (2003). Self-citation and self-reference: Credibility and promotion in academic publication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(3), 251-259.
Lawani, S. M. (1982). On the heterogeneity and classification of author self-citations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 33(5), 281-284.
Pichappan, P. (1995). A dual refinement of journal self-citation. Scientometrics, 33(1), 13-21.
Schubert A.; Glanzel W; Thijs B (2006). The weight of author self-citations. A
fractional approach to self-citation counting. Scientometrics, 67(3),
503-514.
Snyder, H. & Bonzi, S. (1998). Patterns of self-citation across disciplines (1980-1989). Journal of Information Science, 24(6), 431-435.
See also: Bibliographic reference, Reference;
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 20-09-2007