# Citation gaming induced by bibliometric evaluation: a country-level comparative analysis

## TL;DR

This study investigates how bibliometric-based research evaluation policies in Italy have led to increased self-citations and citation clubs, revealing strategic behaviors that influence scientific metrics and the implications for science policy.

## Contribution

It introduces a new inwardness measure to quantify self-referential citation behavior and demonstrates its increase in Italy post-evaluation policy implementation.

## Key findings

- Italy's inwardness increased after 2011 evaluation policy
- Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness
- Strategic citation behaviors like self-citations and citation clubs are prevalent

## Abstract

It is several years since national research evaluation systems around the globe started making use of quantitative indicators to measure the performance of researchers. Nevertheless, the effects on these systems on the behavior of the evaluated researchers are still largely unknown. We attempt to shed light on this topic by investigating how Italian researchers reacted to the introduction in 2011 of national regulations in which key passages of professional careers are governed by bibliometric indicators. A new inwardness measure, able to gauge the degree of scientific self-referentiality of a country, is defined as the proportion of citations coming from the country itself compared to the total number of citations gathered by the country. Compared to the trends of the other G10 countries in the period 2000-2016, Italy's inwardness shows a net increase after the introduction of the new evaluation rules. Indeed, globally and also for a large majority of the research fields, Italy became the European country with the highest inwardness. Possible explanations are proposed and discussed, concluding that the observed trends are strongly suggestive of a generalized strategic use of citations, both in the form of author self-citations and of citation clubs. We argue that the Italian case offers crucial insights on the constitutive effects of evaluation systems. As such, it could become a paradigmatic case in the debate about the use of indicators in science-policy contexts.