ArticlePloS one2018
Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pharmacoepidemiologic Research Based on Common Data Models: Systematic Review and Bibliometric Analysis.JMIR medical informatics · 2025Pooled it
- Building better citation practices in public health research: Practical considerations for student researchers, from source discovery to crafting and positioning claims.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Investigation of authors' self-citation in contemporary forensic odontology literature.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2025Review
- The gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- PubMed knowledge graph 2.0: Connecting papers, patents, and clinical trials in biomedical science.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Gelatin methacryloyl advances in regenerative dentistry: A global bibliometric analysis.Journal of clinical and experimental dentistry · 2025Review
- Trends in self-citation rates in high-impact neurology, neuroscience, and psychiatry journals.eLife · 2025Article
- Patterns of diversity in biomedical coauthorships: An analysis across authors' ethnicity, gender, age, and expertise.PloS one · 2025Article
- Impact of a Fulbright award: A bibliometric analysis of persistence.Health SA = SA Gesondheid · 2025Article
- The global research of artificial intelligence in lung cancer: a 20-year bibliometric analysis.Frontiers in oncology · 2024Article
- Quantitative research assessment: using metrics against gamed metrics.Internal and emergency medicine · 2024Review
- On the sensitivity of centrality metrics.PloS one · 2024Article
- Gender differences in Dutch research funding over time: A statistical investigation of the innovation scheme 2012-2021.PloS one · 2024Article
- Predicting substantive biomedical citations without full text.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Extracellular vesicles in the treatment of oxidative stress injury: global research status and trends.Frontiers in molecular biosciences · 2023Article
- A new tool for evaluating health equity in academic journals; the Diversity Factor.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Self-referencing rates in biological disciplines.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2023Article
- Global research trends and foci of artificial intelligence-based tumor pathology: a scientometric study.Journal of translational medicine · 2022Article
- Author self-citations in the urology literature.Arab journal of urology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.