The practice of self-citations: a longitudinal study

TL;DR

This study examines how the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation influenced self-citation behaviors across various disciplines, revealing increased self-citations especially in fields affected by new assessment rules.

Contribution

It provides a longitudinal analysis of self-citation trends before and after policy changes, highlighting discipline-specific effects and causal relationships.

Findings

Overall increase in self-citations post-2012

Stronger causal link between policy and self-citation increase in 10 disciplines

Self-citation behaviors vary significantly across disciplines

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the outcomes of an experiment where we analysed whether and to what extent the introduction, in 2012, of the new research assessment exercise in Italy (a.k.a. Italian Scientific Habilitation) affected self-citation behaviours in the Italian research community. The Italian Scientific Habilitation attests to the scientific maturity of researchers and in Italy, as in many other countries, is a requirement for accessing to a professorship. To this end, we obtained from ScienceDirect 35,673 articles published from 1957 and 2016 by the participants to the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation, that resulted in the extraction of 1,379,050 citations retrieved through Semantic Publishing technologies. Our analysis showed an overall increment in author self-citations (i.e. where the citing article and the cited article share at least one author) in several of the 24 academic disciplines considered. However, we depicted a stronger causal relation between such increment and the rules introduced by the 2012 Italian Scientific Habilitation in 10 out of 24 disciplines analysed.