Select the "Cited by" link and selecting the "Search within articles citingXYZ work" checkbox to discover the impact of a work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. baseline measure is the all-years citation rate, which is the citation rate for Web of Science - Research Impact Metrics: Citation Analysis - Research 2016; Campanario 2018; Yu et al. As we have shown, Covid-19 papers across all selected fields are being cited at a vastly increased rate compared to non-Covid-19 papers within the same journals. If there are indeed a significant number of individuals who abuse the conventional research system by inappropriate practice then why does the system not detect and sanction this at review before publication? The 10-year averages are calculated from citations from articles published during the same 10-year period. Scientometrics,113(2), 11991207. We agree with a possible criticism that the group of researchers analysed here may not be wholly representative of their field since they are generally likely to be more experienced in building a substantial portfolio of well-cited publications. Research suggests the impact of an article can be, partly, explained by superficial factors and not only by the scientific merits of an article. The difference between research influence and self-citation excess, $${\text{Threshold}} = \left[ {{\text{Q}}3} \right] + \left[ {\left( {{\text{Q}}3 - {\text{Q}}1} \right)*N} \right]$$, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03417-5, How hot are hot papers? Authorship and citation manipulation in academic research. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06142. Whilst in Sociology the number of references, the article length, and title length are among the factors. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102. Social Studies of Science,5(4), 423441. Scopus provide citation counts for articles indexed within it (limited to article written in 1996 and after). We had reason to question this approach when we noted that China was leading in citation rates 2019; Seeber et al. Ramanathan D. Kadirvel, Affiliation: Qualifiers and confounding issues immediately arise when asking what constitutes excessive or extreme levels of author self-citation. The distinction is important, however, since the two phenomena convey different meanings: Self-referencing describes how much an author (or group of authors) draws upon their own work to inform the present work. Lawani, S. M. (1982). Chorus, C. & Waltman, L. (2016). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02458493. A threshold for indicative outliers was then introduced to the graphical analysis. The smaller the percentile, the higher the minimum number of citations. One way that these effects may be observed is through the influence that Covid-19 papers will have on JIF. Gianoli, E., & Molina-Montenegro, M. A. Zhao and Strotmann (2018) argued, on the basis on in-text analysis, that self-citations may be more important than other types of citation. This would seemingly be an impactful factor in how often these articles are being cited. The article's average annual citation rate would be (10 + 5 + 12) / 3 = 9 citations per year. A higher rate of self-citation is expected for co-author than for strict author self-citation, and, in general, a rising rate of co-author self-citation is observed with the growth in average number of authors per paper over time (van Raan 1998; Aksnes 2003; Glnzel and Thijs 2004b). Viiu, G. A. A series of disconnected points, rather more extended than in other fields, lies above this crossing the low and then the high indicative outlier threshold. The preliminary clusters were then cleaned by visual inspection and further aggregated where appropriate. Studies originating in North America, those with six or more authors, sample sizes > 100, and those that are retrospective or prospective case series are independent predictors of greater citation rates at 6 years in orthopedic spine-specific medical literature. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631277500500403. Hyland, K., & Jiang, F. K. (2018). The median (M=Q2) and lower (Q1) and upper (Q3) quartile values for percentage self-citation rate among Highly Cited Researchers were calculated for each ESI field. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090140304. Bott, D. M., & Hargens, L. L. (1991). When controlling for influence of field categorization and article numbers, Covid-19 papers received 84% more citations than non-Covid-19 papers in the non-randomized sample (p<0.001, 95% CI [1.222.45]). Additionally, articles less than 2 years old with less than 5 citations will not have an RCR (e.g., an article published in 2021 will not receive an RCR in 2022 unless it has 5 or more citations). [30], In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, Universit de Montral, Imperial College London, PLOS, eLife, EMBO Journal, The Royal Society, Nature and Science proposed citation distributions metrics as alternative to impact factors. Journal of Documentation,64(1), 4580. 2019; DAntuono and Ciavarella 2019; Ioannidis et al. Note again our strong caveat: a graphical test draws attention to data that may be considered to lie outside behavioural norms for that field, where a statistical test is made problematic by the nature of a skewed distribution, but it still cannot by itself identify any one outlier as egregious. 6, 7, 8, 9) includes all graphs for each field, to illustrate the balance of consistency and variability in self-referencing and self-citing behaviour. (2016). A users guide to inflated and manipulated impact factors. Hendrix, D. (2009). Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. 2018; Baccini et al. Only Covid-19 articles within the Medicine, General, and Internal category were significantly affected by the field itself with a 28% boost in citation rate relative to non-Covid-19 articles (p = 0.029, 95%CI [0.132.43]). Researchers are selected for their publication output in one or more of the 21 fields used in ESI or across several fields (Appendix Table1). B = the total number of citations published during 2020 and 2021. CiteScore covers all journal titles in Elsevier's Scopus database and is released once a year. A variety of values for N may be considered, where a low threshold would be more exclusive, delineating a relatively large proportion of researchers to be reviewed, and a high threshold would be conservative, maximising inclusiveness and focussing only on extreme outliers. The citation impact (average citations per paper) baseline for each variant of subject, year and document type will be calculated as the mean average: Where: e = the expected citation rate or baseline, c = Times Cited, p = the number of papers, f = the field or subject area, t = year, and d = document type. Google Scholar. Calculating Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI). https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.45374. Narin (1976) saw another possible method for manipulating the citation record: If citation analysis becomes an accepted, universal method of evaluating research utilization, scientists may conspire with their colleagues to cite one another to effect an increase in their individual citation counts. Hicks, D. (2012). Ioannidis et al. PLoS Biol. https://doi.org/10.1556/scient.67.2006.3.11. https://doi.org/10.2307/2580486. Scopus is considered by many to be the primary competitor to the Web of Science database for citation analysis and journal ranking statistics.. Eventually, strict regulations and vaccine rollouts were implemented with enough success to begin to slow case growth [4]. It is measured each year by the Web of Science Group and reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). A theoretical evaluation of Hirsch-type bibliometric indicators confronted with extreme self-citation. The highest concentrations of 'citation elite' researchers were in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Belgium. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.025. By the end of January, more than 50 research papers had been published about the outbreak [2]. Are methodological papers more cited than theoretical or empirical ones: the case of sociology. Merton, R. K. (1988). While our research reveals the substantial degree to which Covid-19 articles are being cited in top journals relative to non-Covid-19 articles, the effect on journals themselves remains to be seen. (2015). (2004). `Amongst all fields, only articles categorized as Medicine, General, or Internal according to WOS see a bump (28%) in citation rates that can be attributed to the field itself. The number of times Covid-19 publications are being cited throughout the literature appears remarkably high but has not been directly compared to non-Covid-19 papers in the same journals over an extended period. This libguide provides guidance on metrics and reports that can be used to quantify performance and impact based on publication data. Scientometrics. Regional cases increased rapidly over the next weeks, and scientists worldwide began to take notice. Since the purpose of analysing highly cited research is to recognize scientists and social scientists with community-wide influence, which such portfolios lack, we introduced a filter to detect and review those whose high citation profile was in fact narrow and substantially self-generated. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000027310.68393.bc. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,36(4), 223229. Rousseau, R. (1999). Citation Impact can vary significantly across The Citation Tracker feature also allows for generation of a Citation Overview chart and for removal of self-citations from the overall citation counts. Scientific impact evaluation and the effect of self-citations: Mitigating the bias by discounting the h-Index.