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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, Interesting) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:09PM

    by SunTzuWarmaster (3971) on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:09PM (#883772)

    This. My most-cited research paper is the "we made this system, everyone is using it, and more people ought to" from 2011. One of my least cited papers is "oh yea, and it works as designed!" from 2015. My most read paper is "you can use this system for all kinds of things, here are some ideas" from 2013, which has relatively few citations. Notably, the last two papers cite the first one, because they build on a body of work. Naturally, no one outside the field cares. Somewhat fundamentally, most scientific work, even when successful, is irrelevant.

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