Self-citation in nursing research: Patterns, outliers, and empirical thresholds

Area of Science:

• Bibliometrics
• Nursing Research
• Scholarly Communication

Background:

• Self-citation can inflate citation metrics crucial for research evaluation, faculty promotion, and institutional benchmarking.
• Understanding typical self-citation patterns in nursing is vital due to the increasing reliance on citation indicators.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze self-citation distribution among highly cited nursing researchers.
• To define empirical thresholds for identifying unusually high self-citation patterns in nursing.

Main Methods:

• Bibliometric analysis of Scopus-based author citation data (Ioannidis, 2024).
• Inclusion of 1,375 career-long and 1,403 single-year highly cited nursing researchers.
• Calculation of self-citation rates and identification of excessive thresholds using an interquartile range (IQR) outlier approach.

Main Results:

• Mean self-citation rates were 9.27% (career-long) and 7.88% (single-year), with right-skewed distributions.
• Using strict and liberal IQR thresholds, 2.1% and 0.2% of career-long researchers, and 3.2% and 0.4% of single-year researchers, showed unusually high self-citation.

Conclusions:

• Self-citation in highly cited nursing researchers is predominantly low, with high rates limited to a small proportion of authors.
• Empirical benchmarks are established for interpreting nursing research self-citation patterns.
• These thresholds serve as analytical reference points for citation-based evaluation, not as indicators of misconduct.