Academics in 12 countries are excessively citing their own scholarly papers, according to an analysis of 24 years of data.The authors of the study, published in PLoS ONE on 29 December, say that policies in these countries that incentivize or encourage such citation behaviours are probably behind the trend. For the study, they evaluated the citation patterns of the 50 countries with at least 100,000 publications from 1996 to 2019 indexed in the Scopus research database. 

They found that in 38 of the countries, the number of ‘country self-citations’ — in which researchers in a particular country cite their own papers — decreased over the 24-year period. But in Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Malaysia, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Ukraine, researchers increasingly cited their own papers over the same time period.

As part of the study, Baccini and his colleagues analysed the relevant policies in countries with unusual citation patterns. They concluded that all 12 nations in which self-citation had risen have policies that directly or indirectly incentivize high citation counts. Baccini acknowledges, however, that his study didn’t examine policies in the remaining 38 countries, because it’s difficult to retrace all legislation in every nation.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00090-z#ref-CR1