Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Gratuitous self citation

I'm currently reviewing a manuscript where 38 of the 65 cited papers were written by the senior author. And ~30 of those are at best tangentially related to the manuscript under review... I have never come across such a egregious case of gratuitous self-citation. Have you?


Somehow I don't think this manuscript will see the light of day. At least not in its current form.

13 comments:

Isis the Scientist said...

HA HA HA! Well, if you can't trust yourself to make sure that your papers are cited more than 30 times, who can you trust???

Anonymous said...

I've never seen it that bad before. My post-doc mentor was more liberal with self-citation than I tend to be, and when we wrote together, I would take out gratuitous self-cites, and he would put them back in.

Odyssey said...

What makes it even worse is they haven't cited a couple of papers that they most definitely should have (no, not mine).

Goose said...

That's just funny!

chall said...

hm.... guess they might not be as sure of themselves since they think they need to self-cite?!

I don't even count the times I self-cite myself as "real" citations... Then again, I want others to read my papers! ;)

Dr. No said...

Horrendous, the self-citer recently reviewed one of my papers!

http://acadamnit.blogspot.com/2009/02/clever-post-title-asshole-et-al-2008.html

Prof-like Substance said...

This just happened to me too. But not that bad.

JollyRgr said...

There's a name for people like that over here.....but I'm too polite to 'cite' it!!

Odyssey said...

It is remarkable that a senior investigator thinks that this is acceptable. We all want/need to have our work cited, but this is truly ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

That's totally off the chart. I wonder if they cited themselves correctly in all 38 cases...

Odyssey said...

That's totally off the chart. I wonder if they cited themselves correctly in all 38 cases...

I didn't bother to check. I bet they did. I'd be curious how many of the non-self-citations were correct.

Anonymous said...

Self citation isn't always a bad idea though. But I definately notice a few people in my field will self-cite more than others. In some cases they are justified though- they are that good.

I have noticed as I get older (and get more publication to actually cite) that I do self-cite more often. So your post made me a little paranoid.

Luckily Scopus has this great function that allows the removal of self-cites and my H index is the same without me or any of my co-authors. So I guess I'm not a total fraud, yet.

Ha ha. Word verification= Multict. Nice.

Irving said...

This is cool!