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Comment by techie128 | Hacker News Reader

Not defending people who self-cite but here is an alternative explanation. There are many areas of science that have very few researchers working on the same or related problems. In addition papers tend to build on prior works of the same or related researchers. Over time we may see clusters of what look like "self-cited" papers. This is not abnormal.

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Yup, I self-cite quite a bit. But not to demonstrate productivity or some other arbitrary metric(s). I self-cite because the images I use in my research are really difficult to make and I'm in a niche enough field that using the images really helps people who are not familiar with the area understand what is going on. These images were arduous to make, so I reuse them. (I should note, that I've gotten in "trouble" for reusing them without a citation).

Self-citation or clique-citation is only problematic if it doesn't fulfil its main purpose of providing relevant references. This should not be a surprising statement. But we just read an article where that property of citations is a sideshow. We got to the point where citation scores are bandied about without even asking the main question: "Well are the papers any good?" And now I worry that papers could get worse simply because of a citation-inflation.

I'm currently reading "The Systems Model of Creativity; The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" and was really surprised at the rate of self-citation in the included papers. Now it does seem to me that the cited studies are relevant. And I can't judge whether there would have been papers from other authors even better suited for citing.

And why am I even reading that book? Well because of the persistence with which Csikszentmihalyi gets cited in other writings I read. How do I know these writers weren't shills for Csikszentmihalyi? I don't care all that much when the material is good.

So in the end should I care about backwater publications that cite themselves excessively? Because I don't have to read them. As a consumer I don't seem to get hurt by the practice.

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