Self-Citation Rate

The self-citation rate is the percentage of citations an author or journal receives that trace back to its own prior work: an author citing their own earlier papers, or a journal publishing articles that cite other articles from that same journal. It is a routine, largely unavoidable feature of how research and publishing actually work — and simultaneously one of the most closely watched signals for citation manipulation in research assessment, precisely because it is so easy to inflate deliberately.

Why the rate exists as a distinct metric

Citation-based indicators — the h-index, Journal Impact Factor, and CiteScore among them — all count citations without distinguishing where those citations came from by default. That creates an obvious incentive problem: an author or a journal editorial team can raise a citation-based score simply by citing themselves more, without producing any more useful or higher-quality research. Reporting the self-citation rate alongside the headline metric lets evaluators, funders, and indexing services see how much of a given score is attributable to the entity citing itself versus being cited by the wider field.

How it is calculated

The calculation is the same simple ratio at both levels: self-citations divided by total citations received, over a defined window.

• Author level: citations to a researcher’s publications that were authored (or co-authored) by that same researcher, divided by all citations to that researcher’s publications. Scopus author profiles and Google Scholar profiles both allow this to be isolated by excluding citing documents that share an author with the cited document.
• Journal level: Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports reports ‘journal self-cites’ — citations toward a journal’s Journal Impact Factor that came from articles published in that same journal, over the same citation window (numerator/denominator years) used for the Impact Factor calculation itself. Scopus reports an equivalent figure feeding into CiteScore.

Legitimate uses versus manipulation

A nonzero self-citation rate is expected and, within normal ranges, unremarkable. Researchers working on a sustained research programme routinely cite their own earlier methods papers, datasets, or foundational results — that is simply how a cumulative body of work is built and documented. Specialist journals covering a narrow subfield will also naturally cite themselves more than a broad multidisciplinary title, because there may be few other venues publishing directly comparable work.

The rate becomes a research-integrity concern when it is unusually high relative to field and venue norms, which indexing services treat as a signal of possible citation manipulation rather than a quality problem in itself. Clarivate has documented temporarily suppressing journals from JCR (withholding their Journal Impact Factor for a cycle) where self-citation, or reciprocal citation stacking with a small cluster of partner journals, accounts for an outsized share of Impact-Factor-directed citations. By contrast, Clarivate’s own analysis of the 2014 JCR Science Edition found that 85% of indexed journals had self-citation rates of 15% or lower — giving a rough sense of where ‘normal’ typically sits, though Clarivate does not publish an exact suppression threshold, specifically to make the criterion harder to game.

At the author level, an unusually high self-citation rate can also result from more targeted misconduct: reviewers or editors coercing authors into adding citations to their own or their journal’s papers as a condition of publication, a pattern documented and named coercive citation. Both self-citation inflation and coercive citation are examples of the broader pattern CASRAI’s perverse incentives entry describes: once a metric determines funding, hiring, or promotion outcomes, it creates pressure to optimise the metric directly rather than the underlying research quality it was meant to proxy.

Where the rate is reported

Journal Citation Reports and Scopus both surface self-citation figures as part of their standard journal-metric packages, precisely so that a high Journal Impact Factor or CiteScore can be checked against how much of it is self-generated. Author-level self-citation can be isolated in Scopus Author Details and Google Scholar Citations profiles, though neither platform highlights it as prominently as the journal-level figure in JCR.