TY - JOUR
T1 - Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender
AU - Mishra, Shubhanshu
AU - Fegley, Brent D.
AU - Diesner, Jana
AU - Torvik, Vetle I.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was made possible in part with funding to VIT from National Institute on Aging grant P01AG039347 (https://projectreporter.nih. gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid= 8475017&icde=18058490) and the Directorate for Education & Human Resources of the NSF grant 1348742 (http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/ showAward?AWD_ID=1348742). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the National Institute on Aging of the NIH (Award Number P01AG039347) and the Directorate for Education & Human Resources of the NSF (Award Number 1348742). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH or the NSF. The authors would also like to thank Daniel Maliniak, Jevin West, and other anonymous reviewers who gave valuable feedback on the earlier drafts of this work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Mishra et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2018/9
Y1 - 2018/9
N2 - It was recently reported that men self-cite >50% more often than women across a wide variety of disciplines in the bibliographic database JSTOR. Here, we replicate this finding in a sample of 1.6 million papers from Author-ity, a version of PubMed with computationally disambiguated author names. More importantly, we show that the gender effect largely disappears when accounting for prior publication count in a multidimensional statistical model. Gender has the weakest effect on the probability of self-citation among an extensive set of features tested, including byline position, affiliation, ethnicity, collaboration size, time lag, subject-matter novelty, reference/citation counts, publication type, language, and venue. We find that self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender, who cite their novel journal publications early and in similar venues, and more often cross citation-barriers such as language and indexing. As a result, papers by authors with short, disrupted, or diverse careers miss out on the initial boost in visibility gained from self-citations. Our data further suggest that this disproportionately affects women because of attrition and not because of disciplinary under-specialization.
AB - It was recently reported that men self-cite >50% more often than women across a wide variety of disciplines in the bibliographic database JSTOR. Here, we replicate this finding in a sample of 1.6 million papers from Author-ity, a version of PubMed with computationally disambiguated author names. More importantly, we show that the gender effect largely disappears when accounting for prior publication count in a multidimensional statistical model. Gender has the weakest effect on the probability of self-citation among an extensive set of features tested, including byline position, affiliation, ethnicity, collaboration size, time lag, subject-matter novelty, reference/citation counts, publication type, language, and venue. We find that self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender, who cite their novel journal publications early and in similar venues, and more often cross citation-barriers such as language and indexing. As a result, papers by authors with short, disrupted, or diverse careers miss out on the initial boost in visibility gained from self-citations. Our data further suggest that this disproportionately affects women because of attrition and not because of disciplinary under-specialization.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0195773
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0195773
M3 - Article
C2 - 30256792
AN - SCOPUS:85054104432
VL - 13
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 9
M1 - e0195773
ER -