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Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

nature.com

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Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#191

Post by skohan »

Jhsto wrote: post #100
cbanek wrote: post #56

As someone who now works in astronomy, I'm not at all surprised at the high self-citation rate for the field. It is true that a lot of papers are published by large consortiums. For example, at LSST (where I work), if you have been working on the project for 2 years, you are considered a "builder" and added as an author to all major project wide papers. Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are…

> I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author. Also, it's worth mentioning that countries which support PhD via publication essentially require you to conduct self-citing research. This is to show you've had a common thread between your research, and that the PhD can be defended as to have all the papers be considered to be on the same subject.

To be honest it seems perfectly reasonably for a researcher to bring up their own related work. Maybe there should just be a separate metric which separates self-citations so it's transparent.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#192

Post by jeffwass »

jeffwass wrote: post #75

My undergrad college physics professor (Fay Ajzenberg-Selove) introduced this metric back in the 50’s. She faced major sexism and bullshit claims against her productivity, and had to use this metric to prove her detractors wrong, that she was as good as or better than most of her male colleagues in terms of performing useful and interesting research, to earn herself a faculty position. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki…

Did I describe this wrong? Not sure why it got moderates down.

Basically, my professor was one of the first female physicists trying to make it in a clearly male-dominated field nearly 60+ years ago.

She was not offered jobs, or jobs at reduced salary vs male colleagues, being told her research was not as productive.

She literally invented the concept of considering number of citations as a proof of impact, relevancy, and productivity, and showed that her work was better than most of her male colleagues.

Only after she jumped through this hoop herself was she able to get a faculty position. Damn impressive of her.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#193

Post by wpietri »

314 wrote: post #180
wpietri wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, I understood what you were saying before. I just disagree. I think the right approach is to select trusted experts and let them make the decisions about their fields. Again, since this is a tech community, let me use that for an analogy. It's a classic problem for non-technical founders to evaluate their technical hires. They aren't qualified. The right solution is not to find some gameable metric o…

This raises a simple issue: how would the non-experts in an area choose the most appropriate set of experts? In this case it would correspond to funding agencies or governments needing to decide on a "fair" way to establish the right experts to ask. It is very difficult to suggest a way to do this that would not correlate strongly with "highly successful under the current system". That group of experts would, of cour…

I think we solve this problems not through finding a universal approach, but through heterogeneity.

We fund academic work because we see value in it. But there are many kinds of value, and many different sorts of value. So I think it's appropriate that we have many different universities which have many different departments. Many different funding agencies and many different foundations. Each group has their own heuristics for picking the seed experts.

There are still systemic biases, of course, but that's true of any approach. And distributed power is much more robust to that then centralized power or a single homogeneous system.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#194

Post by Bartweiss »

cbanek wrote: post #170
o09rdk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably varies by field, but the "large project" thing can be gamed too. So, for example, in biomedicine you often have lots of people on a paper who might only read a draft, make some trivial suggestions, and then be added as an author. As a result, there's this pressure for large groups to form, where everyone is added and everyone can cite each other. This doesn't mean the projects are bad, but it does lead…

I don't disagree with what your saying, but I think LSST's builder concept is actually quite amazing and the opposite side of that coin. For people building the telescope (think hardware, software, logistics, everything before the science can be done), many of whom are not academics, and don't typically get authorship or write papers, it's great to get credit for working on the project in a formal, public way. You do…

The builder concept is actually really appealing. Academia can tend towards the same problem as consulting, where tasks get sharply split between "credit-producing" and "not worth doing".

Answering questions about your past papers; looking over someone else's proposed methodology; or cleaning up an internal tool into one you can share are all great tasks for advancing the field, but none of them bolster a CV, earn grants, or help you get tenure. If you want credit for them, you usually have to commit lots more time to the task, like running a formal discussion, becoming an author, or polishing the tool into an OSS contribution. All too often, the result is siloed projects and work abandoned as soon as it's published. (How many papers offering some novel twist on priming or ego depletion could have been turned into replication-and-extension if past authors had been involved?)

Especially in astronomy, with large projects and lots of non-PhD team members, this makes so much sense. (I believe something similar may happen at LIGO - if not formally then at least in practice?) If work is going to be judged by authorship, it's only fair to recognize that at a certain point the groundwork and floating aid people give is comparably valuable to the act of writing up some chunk of the text.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#195

Post by n1000 »

n1231231231234 wrote: post #120
not2b wrote: post #106

Self-citation is appropriate for a new paper that builds on the results of a previous paper. But in evaluating how influential a researcher is, it makes sense to exclude self-citation, while being careful to avoid any implication that self-citation is wrong.

when self-citation is OK and when it is not OK should be part of one's academic training/phd training. PLOS gives reasonable citation guidelines, and in this context their Rule 5 is particular relevant: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Great link. Thank you. I fully agree with rule 5, which puts this article in a different perspective.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#196

Post by ajuc »

o09rdk wrote: post #168
cbanek wrote: post #56

As someone who now works in astronomy, I'm not at all surprised at the high self-citation rate for the field. It is true that a lot of papers are published by large consortiums. For example, at LSST (where I work), if you have been working on the project for 2 years, you are considered a "builder" and added as an author to all major project wide papers. Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are…

This probably varies by field, but the "large project" thing can be gamed too. So, for example, in biomedicine you often have lots of people on a paper who might only read a draft, make some trivial suggestions, and then be added as an author. As a result, there's this pressure for large groups to form, where everyone is added and everyone can cite each other. This doesn't mean the projects are bad, but it does lead…

The problem is with the binary attribution. Either you're an author of everything in the paper or you're not an author at all.

Software world solved this issue with version control systems like git. And if scientists write papers in latex or other text-based formats it's trivial to use version control system for that too.

Then when you quote a fragment you do "git blame" on it, and you see who created and edited this fragment, so you can quote only the relevant people instead of authors of the whole book.

This would make it much harder to abuse quotation rankings.

Additional benefits - when a paper is found to contain manipulated data or other errors - it's trivial to check who did it, so only that person's career is done.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#197

Post by Bartweiss »

skohan wrote: post #191
Jhsto wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author. Also, it's worth mentioning that countries which support PhD via publication essentially require you to conduct self-citing research. This is to show you've had a common thread between your research, and that the PhD can be defended as to have all the papers be considered to be on the same subject.

To be honest it seems perfectly reasonably for a researcher to bring up their own related work. Maybe there should just be a separate metric which separates self-citations so it's transparent.

The most extreme cases of self-citation are definitely bad news.

There seem to be some authors and author groups who rely almost entirely on self-citation for impact factor, allowing them to get by with irrelevant or unchecked work. It might be possible to detect that with a metric like self-citation or high author-placement self-citation as a fraction of overall citations.

But overall, it seems like this metric should be limited to exploratory use. There are wholly legitimate cases of frequent self-citation, like mathemeticians pioneering a new technique, or astronomy research groups which cite a large support team and product many sequential findings. Discerning an apparent citation-mill like Vel Tech R&D from a legitimate research group like the LSST requires thought, not just statistics.

Meanwhile, the most egregious self-citers are usually doing something else wrong too. Robert Sternberg wasn't just self-citing, he was reusing large amounts of text without acknowledgement, and abusing his journal editorship to publish his own works without peer review. The Vel Tech author in the article seems to be citing his own past works which are irrelevant beyond vaguely falling in the same field, and the enormous range in his work (from food chain models to neurobiology to machine learning to fusion reactors) makes me suspect it's either inaccurate or insignificant.

Ioannidis is damn good at what he does, and was far too sensible to broadly condemn high self-citation researchers. But it would be a real shame to see self-citation rate blindly added to university standards the way citations and impact factor were. The lesson here is that reducing academic impact to statistical measures of papers doesn't work, not that we need some more statistical measures.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#198

Post by cr0sh »

mschuster91 wrote: post #175
o09rdk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably varies by field, but the "large project" thing can be gamed too. So, for example, in biomedicine you often have lots of people on a paper who might only read a draft, make some trivial suggestions, and then be added as an author. As a result, there's this pressure for large groups to form, where everyone is added and everyone can cite each other. This doesn't mean the projects are bad, but it does lead…

> Science gets done but the rewards seem to filter preferentially to those who are able to game the system, and the system exists out of a need to make one's self look as productive as possible This is largely due to the current model of science funding, and not just in the US. Here in Germany, many involved in public (i.e. at an university, not inhouse r&d at a company) science only get 1-year-limited chain contract…

> This would also solve the problem that e.g. NASA has with each President reversing course. No wonder that the last Moon visit was decades ago when the priorities get completely turned over every 4-8 years.

This is also one of the arguments against promoters of so-called "term limits" for congressmen and others; imagine this kind of churn in priorities occurring with major and minor public works projects!

We don't have to wonder too much - we can already see it at the state level with governorships changing; one recent large change of this kind is with California's high-speed rail system. For all of it's "boondoggle-ry" and problems, I don't think the way it's been "axed" lately will be of help to completing it. In fact, it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy for its opponents.

That's only one example; I'm sure others in other states could be easily found as well if one were to look. Ultimately, that kind of thing would only get worse with term limits on representatives to Congress, because federal funding for such large scale projects is needed - and that would end up likely in flux, and ultimately scuttle projects that depend on steady funding to be completed.

One could argue that individual state projects should only be funded by the state itself, but that notion of state self-sufficiency went out with the end of the Civil War. I also tend to wonder if - under a term-limited system - such a thing as the interstate highway system could have ever been built. It doesn't seem likely.

Re: Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database

#199

Post by usrusr »

duskwuff wrote: post #24
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that it's the Cobra effect. Did it actively make them less productive?

If it means that some academics are choosing to cite their own papers rather than keeping up to date on the literature of their field, there's likely to be some potential insights missed.

Not self-citing in incremental work would be like a software team erasing commit history at the beginning of each sprint, claiming that it's all new code. The post-metric amount of self citing might be less misleading than what they did before.
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