Uncitedness and self-citations

[Wallace Koehler]

This is all very interesting. I would add yet another variable to the mix -
co-authored papers. My students and I have collected data from a number of
journal. We find (to no great surprise) that the frequency of journal
co-authorship (2+ authors)as well as "multi-authorship" (3+ authors) have
increased over time, at least in the IS fields -- for example the mean
number of authors per AD/JASIS article in the 1950s was on the order of 1.2
but rose to about 1.9 in the 1990s. With this increase in article
co-authorship, problems of measurement of self-citation may arise. If I
were to self-cite an article where I am the sole author, does that count as
1 cs? If I self-cite an article where I am the senior of 14 co-authors, is
that 0.07 cs? or 1 cs? Where I am not senior, but one of several co-authors?

To add yet another wrinkle, we suspect that "different disciplines exhibit
different behavior." What we have found in IS may not hold across other
disciplines. We have begun to explore literature in the humanities. Our
first venture was ISIS, a history of science journal. ISIS began
publication in 1913. It was then and remains today largely the vehicle of
single authors.  Should we then add some kind of "correction" for field
behavior, field behavior over time?

These same issues have, of course, been addressed in the literature for
productivity measures. If we lack agreement there, can we reach concensus
on impact measures.

At 12:50 PM 12/5/00 +0000, you wrote:
>   Recent list contributions on these two topics have been interesting but
>no-one seems to have suggested a possible connection. I know that it is
>unwise  to speculate in the absence of data, but I have a suspicion that
>one of the  possible prime reasons for self-citations is to avoid
>uncitedeness, or at least  low-citedness.       self-citations are the sole
>citations or at least predominate a  paper's citations.    to which they
>dominate the citations as follows:
> is (1-p)N +  (1-p)pN, so that each of the (1-p)N non-self-citations is
>given full weight but  each of the pN self-citations is discounted by a
>factor (1-p).   0.2x100 + 0.2x0.8x100 = 20 + 16 =  36.    0.2x100 = 80 + 16
> = 96.  A 50-50 mix would lead to a DCS of 75, all 100 non-self-citations a
> DCS of 100 and all 100 self-citations a DCS of 0.    Note that, so far as
>calculations are concerned, it is easiest to  write DCS = (1-p)N + (1-p)pN
>= (1-p)(1+p)N = (1-p^2)N   I would be interested to know what list members
>think of these scores or,  more to the point, has anyone investigated this
>kind of thing before?    to the time period. Incorporating the time
>parameter to  develop a stochastic model of citation accumulation would be
>most interesting.  Again could people point me in the right direction if
>this has already been done  (possibly by Ronald himself?).   Best wishes
>Quentin Burrell
****************************************************************
Wallace Koehler
Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Studies
University of Oklahoma
wkoehler at ou.edu
405.325.3921  FAX 405.325.7648