Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than 63 million articles and 51 million disambiguated authors, this paper examines the relative importance of self-citations and self-references in the scholarly communication landscape, their relationship with the age and gender of authors, as well as their effects on various research evaluation indicators. Results show that self-citations and self-references evolve in different directions throughout researchers' careers, and that men and older researchers are more likely to self-cite. Although self-citations have, on average, a small to moderate effect on author's citation rates, they highly inflate citations for a subset of researchers. Comparison of the abstracts of cited and citing papers to assess the relatedness of different types of citations shows that self-citations are more similar to each other than other types of citations, and therefore more relevant. However, researchers that self-reference more tend to include less relevant citations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of self-citations in scholarly communication.
翻译:引文也是研究评估的核心,因此鼓励研究人员引用自己的作品。本文件利用一套数据集,其中载有6 300多万篇文章和5 100万不相干的作者,审视了自引和自评在学术交流景观中的相对重要性、与作者年龄和性别的关系及其对各种研究评估指标的影响。结果显示自引文和自引文在整个研究人员职业生涯中在不同方向上演变,而且男性和老年研究人员更有可能自译自审。虽然自引文平均对作者的引文率有小到中度的影响,但对一组研究人员的自引文却大增引文。所引用和引用的论文摘要比较评估不同类型引文的关联性表明自引文与其他类型的引文相比更为相似,因此更为相关。自引文往往包括较少的相关引文。论文最后讨论了自引文在学术交流中的作用。</s>