Authors self-citation behaviour in the field of Library and Information Science

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the author self-citation behavior in the field of Library and Information Science. Various factors governing the author self-citation behavior have also been studied. Design/methodology/approach – The 2012 edition of Social Science Citation Index was consulted for the selection of LIS journals. Under the subject heading “Information Science and Library Science” there were 84 journals and out of these 12 journals were selected for the study based on systematic sampling. The study was confined to original research and review articles that were published in select journals in the year 2009. The main reason to choose 2009 was to get at least five years (2009-2013) citation data from Web of Science Core Collection (excluding Book Citation Index) and SciELO Citation Index. A citation was treated as self-citation whenever one of the authors of citing and cited paper was common, i.e., the set of co-authors of the citing paper and that of the cited one are not disjoint. To minimize the risk of homonyms, spelling variances and misspelling in authors’ names, the authors compared full author names in citing and cited articles. Findings – A positive correlation between number of authors and total number of citations exists with no correlation between number of authors and number/share of self-citations, i.e., self-citations are not affected by the number of co-authors in a paper. Articles which are produced in collaboration attract more self-citations than articles produced by only one author. There is no statistically significant variation in citations counts (total and self-citations) in works that are result of different types of collaboration. A strong and statistically significant positive correlation exists between total citation count and frequency of self-citations. No relation could be ascertained between total citation count and proportion of self-citations. Authors tend to cite more of their recent works than the work of other authors. Total citation count and number of self-citations are positively correlated with the impact factor of source publication and correlation coefficient for total citations is much higher than that for self-citations. A negative correlation exhibits between impact factor and the share of self-citations. Of particular note is that the correlation in all the cases is of weak nature. Research limitations/implications – The research provides an understanding of the author self-citations in the field of LIS. readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample, tracing citations also from Book Citation Index (WoS) and comparing results with other allied subjects so as to validate the robustness of the findings of this study. Originality/value – Readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample, tracing citations also from Book Citation Index (WoS) and comparing results with other allied subjects so as to validate the robustness of the findings of this study.

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