Associated Self-Citations and Propagation Luck: Two Problems with Citation Counts

Abstract:There is considerable merit in discounting self-citations when measuring the worth of a paper, a journal, or an author bibliometrically. However, excluding self-citations from the citation count for a paper or a researcher does not completely solve the problem of how to properly measure the interest generated by a paper or a researcher because other deficiencies in citation counts remain. One of these is associated self-citation. This occurs when a subset of the authors who published one paper go on to publish another paper in which they cite the previous one; any authors of the first paper whose names are not on the second paper receive a full citation credit (called here an associated self-citation), but the repeated authors do not because they are disqualified by self-citation. Associated self-citations, in which unrepeated authors receive citation credit, can skew a measure of bibliometric worth, but it is a deficiency that can be redressed. Additionally, there is propagation luck—where a paper becomes the reference to cite when there are other comparable and worthy candidates—which is a problem that can be only partially addressed. In this paper, the author analyzes these deficiencies with an example that compares the bibliometric success of two articles of which he was a co-author.