Self-citation Analysis using Sentence Embeddings
Abstract
The purpose of citation indexes and metrics is intended to be a measure for scientific innovation and quality for researchers, journals, and institutions. However, those metrics are often prone to abuse and manipulation by excessive and unethical self-citations induced by authors, reviewers, editors, or journals. Identifying whether there are or not legitimate reasons for self-citations is normally determined during the review process, where the participating parts may have intrinsic incentives, rendering the legitimacy of self-citations, after publication, questionable. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale analysis of journal self-citations while taking into consideration the similarity between a publication and its references. Specifically, we look into PubMed Central articles published since 1990 and compute similarities of article-reference pairs using sentence embeddings. We examine journal self-citations with an aim to distinguish between justifiable and unethical self-citations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2105.05527,
title = {Self-citation Analysis using Sentence Embeddings},
author = {Athanasios Lagopoulos and Grigorios Tsoumakas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.05527},
year = {2021}
}