Impact of self-citation on author h-index in anaesthesiology and pain medicine.

Editor—Self-citation refers to the practice of authors citing their own previous works within a new publication. 1 Mishra S. Fegley B.D. Diesner J. Torvik V.I. Self-citation is the hallmark of productive authors, of any gender. PLoS One. 2018; 13e0195773 Google Scholar It is a known and common phenomenon in academic publishing. For example, in high-profile general medicine journals, it is as frequent as one self-citation in every 15 references. 2 Kulkarni A.V. Aziz B. Shams I. Busse J.W. Author self-citation in the general medicine literature. PLoS One. 2011; 6e20885 Google Scholar Whilst some self-citation is certainly warranted, as when an author cites their own work in the same field, whenever a research article is cited only for the purpose of increasing metrics, 3 Mehregan M. Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing. Res Ethics. 2022; 18: 163-168 Google Scholar it impairs research impartiality and validity, skews literature representation, and limits exposure to alternative perspectives, ultimately leading to bias. 4 Huang M.H. Lin W.Y.C. Probing the effect of author self-citations on h index: a case study of environmental engineering. J Inf Sci. 2011; 37: 453-461 Google Scholar ,5 Foley J.A. Della Sala S. The impact of self-citation. Cortex. 2010; 46: 802-810 Google Scholar Extreme self-citation is one of the main forms of citation manipulation, as described by Garfield 6 Garfield E. Citation indexes for science. A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas. Science. 1955; 122: 108-111 Google Scholar in 1955 and flagged by the Committee on Publication Ethics. 7 COPE CouncilCOPE discussion document: citation manipulation. 2019https://publicationethics.org/files/COPE_DD_A4_Citation_Manipulation_Jul19_SCREEN_AW2.pdfDate accessed: July 11, 2023 Google Scholar We investigated the impact of self-citation on the h-index in the fields of anaesthesiology and pain medicine. The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that a given author has published at least h papers, each of which has been cited at least h times. Our hypothesis was that this phenomenon can greatly influence individual citation metrics.