Handling self-citations using Google Scholar
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: The increasing use of citation impact indexes for evaluation and comparison not only of individual researchers \nbut also of institutions, universities and even countries has prompted the development of new citation metrics. \nCurrently, the number of publications and citations is widely accepted as an easy and balanced way to compare \nscientists. Calculation of such statistics depends on the availability of a comprehensive database of publications \nand their citations. Google Scholar aims at providing such a service and is currently the most widely used freely \navailable search engine for scientific and academic literature. However, the citations generally used to calculate \ncitation statistics include self-citations, which deviates from the intention of using citations as a reflection of \nresearch impact. \nTo the best of our knowledge, there are no available tools for calculating citation statistics that account for \nself-citations. We present a web-based service CIDS (Citation Impact Discerning Self-citations), that takes into \naccount self-citations. An assessment of CIDS in a research team has shown that both the number of citations \nand the h-index is sensitive to self-citations at the individual level, the h-index increasing 24% on average when \nconsidering them. However, self-citation is highly variable among individuals and its contribution highly variable. \nWe conclude that at the individual and research unit level, self-citations are not dismissible when calculating \ncitation statistics. Even the h-index is influenced by self-citation and comparing individuals without taking them \nin account can produce misleading results
Institution: University of Lisbon
Language: English
Subfield: Library and Information Sciences
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2160110217