Journals go through some procedure to be indexed by ISI as IF journal and with the condition that Self Citations should be not more than 20% for consective two years. If they are so Thomson Resuters removes the journal from the IF journals list, which is also called journal is black listed by researcher community.
I have a question why the authors are also not black listed based on doing selfcitations more than 20% of total. I know people started group citations, and other tricks like making 3 group of publishers and not self cite but cite each other.
Dear Ali,
I didn't know that Thomson Reuters applied such an assessment, but I can think of examples of certain research areas in which high numbers of self citations are entirely justifiable. For example, in systematics and taxonomy, researchers are often leading authorities on particular groups of organisms and may have published extensively on them over several decades. It follows that an overview of research in the introduction of a taxonomic paper includes many self citations.
A good reviewer can easily pick up examples of abuse of self-citations (e.g. where the authors' own work is only peripheral to the point being made or where their work is cited to the exclusion of more relevant work by other authors). A vigilant editor can easily ask reviewers to pay attention to such abuses when completing their reviews, but in my experience, few if any of them do this.
Cheers,
Matt
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