51. Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender.
- Author
-
Mishra, Shubhanshu, Fegley, Brent D., Diesner, Jana, and Torvik, Vetle I.
- Subjects
- *
SOCIAL conditions of women , *ETHNICITY , *GENDER differences (Sociology) , *AUTHORS , *CITATION analysis - 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2018
- Full Text
- View/download PDF