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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 22 2019, @02:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3196

Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

The world's most-cited researchers, according to newly released data, are a curiously eclectic bunch. Nobel laureates and eminent polymaths rub shoulders with less familiar names, such as Sundarapandian Vaidyanathan from Chennai in India. What leaps out about Vaidyanathan and hundreds of other researchers is that many of the citations to their work come from their own papers, or from those of their co-authors.

Vaidyanathan, a computer scientist at the Vel Tech R&D Institute of Technology, a privately run institute, is an extreme example: he has received 94% of his citations from himself or his co-authors up to 2017, according to a study in PLoS Biology this month. He is not alone. The data set, which lists around 100,000 researchers, shows that at least 250 scientists have amassed more than 50% of their citations from themselves or their co-authors, while the median self-citation rate is 12.7%.

The study could help to flag potential extreme self-promoters, and possibly 'citation farms', in which clusters of scientists massively cite each other, say the researchers. "I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe," says John Ioannidis, a physician at Stanford University in California who specializes in meta-science — the study of how science is done — and who led the work. "Those with greater than 25% self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed," he says.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:41PM (3 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:41PM (#883677) Journal

    Who are you kidding? A couple dozen people would care at most.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @04:18PM (#883691)

    Write a paper, citing yourself for credibility, and don't ever tell anyone you had a sit in for the high school equivalency exam because you're a dumbass. Yep, sounds like India.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:05PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:05PM (#883716)

    I imagine most every researcher that *doesn't* game the system cares. As do many of the bureaucrats who want a nice easy to use metric that's at least somewhat accurate.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:56PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:56PM (#883739) Journal

      You'd think so, but my sense is "other academics are gaming the system" isn't a top 10 even specifically in the space of academic politics. Things like "Fuck I hate writing grant proposals" and "Why is my name third and not second on this paper" and "I need better TAs to take over my teaching duties" and "What happened to tenure" push it out.