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The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between journal self‐citation and journal impact factor (JIF)/journal immediacy index (JII).

This research examined research papers in 20 key journals in environmental engineering with a publication year range of 1999 to 2008. The bibliographical information of cited references was obtained from the Science Citation Index Expanded of the Web of Science.

The findings indicated that JIF and JII values changed only slightly regardless of the inclusion or exclusion of self‐citations, suggesting that the influence of self‐citation on journals was insignificant. Consequently there is no need for evaluations to exclude journal self‐citations in journal or researcher evaluations. In addition the findings indicated that JIF and five‐year JIF were highly correlated, suggesting that it would not be necessary to extend the calculation of JIF to five years. Considering the cost in terms of time and effort, the two‐year JIF is sufficient in the discipline of environmental engineering.

This research provides a better understanding of journal self‐citations in journal or researcher evaluation with JIF and JII as indicators.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The present study aims to determine the prevailing trend of self-citations across 27 major subject disciplines at global level. The study also examines the aspects like percentage of self-citations in each individual subject discipline and the average number of self-citations per publication across different subject disciplines. The study also investigates self-citation percentage of research articles published from the 20 leading research countries of the world and across the continents.

The study is supported by empirical findings undertaken on secondary data retrieved from SCImago Journal and Country Ranking, which is entirely based on the SCOPUS data source (SCImago, 2014).

In all, 76,634,557 citations were received by as many as 14,946,975 research articles published from 2008-2012 at an average of 5.12 citations per article. Of the total citations received, 26,404,609 (34.45 per cent) were self-citations, which means that of the total citations received by each research article, 1.76 are self-citations. Compared to subject disciplines falling under social and humanistic sciences, pure and applied sciences have shown a greater trend of self-citation. On average, 4.18 self-citations were observed in each research article published in multidisciplinary subject disciplines. Of the total citations received by research articles published in the discipline of Psychology, 43.69 per cent are self-citations, the highest among all the subject disciplines under study. Of the total self-citations received by all the subject disciplines under study, 18.43 per cent were received alone in medicine, highest among all, whereas Social and Humanistic sciences received less than 1.00 per cent self-citations, the lowest among all the subject disciplines.

This study is original and first of its kind covering each individual subject discipline having global scope.

The purpose of this study was to determine the rate of self‐citation in the library and information science literature. A sample of 1,058 articles was examined. 50% of the articles examined contained at least one self‐citation. Articles that were reports of research, that were written by a faculty member, that addressed a theoretical topic, or that had multiple authors were all more likely to have to higher self‐citation rates. The self‐citation rate of 50% was higher than that reported in studies of self‐citation rates in the sciences and social sciences. However, the percentage of self‐citations as related to total citations of 6.6% falls between the percentage reported in the sciences and that reported in other social sciences.

Science is a continuum of experiences consisting of authors and their publications, and the authors’ experience is an integral part of their work that gets reflected through self-citations. Thus, self-citations can be employed in measuring the relevance between publications and tracking the evolution of research. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Based on the bibliographic data obtained from Scopus, this study constructs and visualizes the self-citation networks of ten Nobel laureates 2018, in the fields of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economic Science, to demonstrate the evolving process of each laureate’s research across his or her scholarly career.

Statistics indicate that prominent scientists, such as Nobel laureates, have also frequently cited their own publications. However, their self-cited rates are quite low. Self-citations constitute an indispensable part of the citation system but contribute little to authors’ scientific impact, regardless of artificial self-citations. Self-citation networks present a trajectory that shows the evolving process of research across a scientist’s long-term scholarly career. There are obvious differences in self-citation patterns and network structures of different laureates without a disciplinary difference observed. The structures of self-citation networks are significantly influenced by laureates’ productivity. In addition, it is laureates’ own research patterns and citation habits that lead to the diversified patterns and structures of self-citation networks.

Only scientific achievements presented in the form of publications are investigated and other kinds of scientific output, such as patents, are not included. Moreover, this approach is fit for scientists who have had a longer career and higher productivity.

This study proves the feasibility and effectiveness of self-citation analysis as a new way to examine research evolution.

Both journal self-citations and exchanged citations have the effect of increasing a journal’s impact factor, which may be deceptive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse academic journal quality and research impact using quality-weighted citations vs total citations, based on the widely used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A new Index of Citations Quality (ICQ) is presented, based on quality-weighted citations.

The new index is used to analyse the leading 500 journals in both the sciences and social sciences, as well as finance and accounting, using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs) that are based on alternative transformations of citations.

It is shown that ICQ is a useful additional measure to 2-year impact factor (2YIF) and other well-known RAMs for the purpose of evaluating the impact and quality, as well as ranking, of journals as it contains information that has very low correlations with the information contained in the well-known RAMs for both the sciences and social sciences, and finance and accounting.

Journals can, and do, inflate the number of citations through self-citation practices, which may be coercive. Another method for distorting journal impact is through a set of journals agreeing to cite each other, that is, by exchanging citations. This may be less coercive than self-citations, but is nonetheless unprofessional and distortionary.

The premise underlying the use of citations data is that higher quality journals generally have a higher number of citations. The impact of citations can be distorted in a number of ways, both consciously and unconsciously.

Regardless of whether self-citations arise through collusive practices, the increase in citations will affect both 2YIF and 5-year impact factor (5YIF), though not Eigenfactor and Article Influence. This leads to an ICQ, where a higher ICQ would generally be preferred to lower. Unlike 5YIF, which is increased by journal self-citations and exchanged citations, and Eigenfactor and Article Influence, both of which are affected by quality-weighted exchanged citations, ICQ will be less affected by exchanged citations. In the absence of any empirical evidence to the contrary, 5YIF and AI are assumed to be affected similarly by exchanged citations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of selected factors in journal citations. Various factors can affect citations distribution of journals. Among them, skewness of citations distribution, author self-citation, journal self-citation and recitations (RCs) have been studied.

The present study based on 16 systematically selected journals indexed in Scopus under the subject category “Library and Information Science.” The study was confined to original research and review articles that were published in the selected journals in the year 2011. The temporal citation window from 2011 to 2014 was taken for analysis. Tools like, Scopus author ID, ORCID and author profiles from Google Scholar were used to minimize the error due to homonyms, spelling variances and misspelling in authors’ names.

It is found that citations distribution in majority of the journals under the study is highly skewed and more likely to follow log-normal distribution. The nature of authorship in papers was found to have positive effect on citation counts. Self-citing data show that higher ranked journals have rather less direct impact on total citation counts than their lower counterpart. RCs are also found to be more in top-tier journals. Though the influence of self-citations and RCs were relatively less at individual level on total citations of journals but combined, they can play a dominant role and can affect total citation counts of journals at significant level.

The present study is based on Scopus database only. Therefore, citation data can be affected by the inherent limitation of Scopus. Readers are encouraged to further the study by taking into account large sample and tracing citations from an array of citation indexes, such as Web of Science, Google citations, Indian Citation Index, etc.

This paper reinforces that the citations received by journals can be affected by the factors selected in this study. Therefore, the study provides better understanding of the role of these selected factors in journal citations.

Journal quality and prestige are the main considerations for researchers, editors, and publishers when submitting manuscripts, citing papers, and developing publishing policies. Journal Citation Reports calculates the impact factor (IF) from journals covered in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). IF is widely considered as an indicator of journal quality and prestige among business disciplines. Thus, researching what affects the IF is critical. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between journal features and the IF, particularly between “hot issues” and the IF, and categorizes journal rankings into top-ten and other journals.

The research sample encompasses publications from 2003 to 2013, focussing specifically on SSCI journals in the categories of business and finance. The examined journal features are the effect of the newly selected as an SSCI journal, frequency of publication, self-citation ratio, citable items, and whether the journal features articles on relevant international economic topics.

The findings are as follows: increasing the publishing frequencies of top-ten journals will elevate IF significantly, conversely, increasing that of other journals will degrade the expected IF; both top-ten and other journals with a high self-citation ratio have a low IF; and publishing papers on critical topics significantly positively affects the IF; however, the level of significance decreases over time. In summary, publishing research on critical topics significantly increases the IF in short term.

The findings offer valuable information for researchers, editors, and publishers.

To analyze information use in agricultural science PhD theses submitted between 1986 and 2002 in the Faculty of Agronomy, Central University of Venezuela (UCV).

The source of information was the UCV Faculty of Agronomy, Library's database, “Tesis”. The unidimensional production and use indicators analyzed included: scientific production, reference density, self‐citations, document contemporaneousness and type of documents cited, reference scattering and accessibility of the journals cited.

The analysis of the data obtained from 4,646 bibliographic references in 42 agricultural science PhD theses provides insight into information use in a Venezuelan agricultural science community. The mean number of references per thesis found was 113 ± 21. The number of women earning a PhD in agriculture was observed to grow. The percentage of self‐citations varied widely. The half‐life was 11 years and the Price's Index 22 per cent. According to the distribution by document type, most of the publications cited were articles in journals, while references to technical standards and internet publications were rare. UCV Faculty of Agronomy PhD students tended to seek information primarily in the Anglo Saxon literature. The Celestino Bonfanti Library periodicals section met a high proportion (92 per cent) of the demand for journals located in the first and second concentration‐scattering zones.

This is the only paper on the evaluation of PhD theses in Venezuela. The findings will be useful for education planners in Venezuela and other developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of the supply chain management and logistics (SCML) strategy journals recently added to the Web of Science database to the performance of journals from other business disciplines also recently admitted to the Web of Science database on the Thomson Reuters selection process criteria.

A benchmarking approach is used to examine the relative performance of SCML journals over a two‐year period.

The two sets of journals' publishing standards and the number of citations for authors from the two groups are quite similar. Journals in the benchmark group had greater international diversity and balance among their authors, editors and editorial boards, while the SCML journals were cited more often in Web of Science and had lower self‐citation rates.

This study required a great deal of counting, and some of the data were collected multiple times to check for accuracy. Still, it is possible that mistakes were made. Data from different years and different authors may have yielded different results.

The recent addition of six journals to the Web of Science database allows leading SCML journals to compete on a level playing field with other top‐tier business journals and can therefore be regarded as a major step forward in the maturation of the discipline, as well as recognition of the quality of the journals.

The authors' benchmarking study extends previous examinations of SCML journals relative to leading journals in other business fields, and offers direction for how SCML researchers and journal editors can continue to contribute to the maturation of the discipline.