Journal Self-Citation VI: Forced Journal Self-Citation – Common, Appropriate, Ethical?

Abstract

Forced journal self-citation, as defined in this paper, has serious implications for the IS field. We introduce a statistical perspective on how common the practice is, discuss whether it is appropriate or not, and evaluate its ethicality. We find that journal self-citations do influence journal impact factors, a measure of journal quality and a tool for many schools in their promotion and tenure process. We suggest that forced self-citations are not considered appropriate by community standards nor are they ethical in terms of the greatest good. We therefore propose that impact factors be disseminated both with and without self-citations to make the practice of forced self-citation more transparent to the IS community. An example of the proposal is shown.

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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.