Slashdot: Some of the World's Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That's Just Been Exposed

Some of the World's Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That's Just Been Exposed
Published on August 31, 2019 at 10:04PM
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert: Among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there's a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent "extreme self-citations and 'citation farms' (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other's papers)," explain the authors of the new study, led by physician turned meta-researcher John Ioannidis from Stanford University. Ioannidis helps to run Stanford's meta-research innovation centre, called Metrics, which looks at identifying and solving systemic problems in scientific research. One of those problems, Ioannidis says, is how self-citations compromise the reliability of citation metrics as a whole, especially at the hands of extreme self-citers and their associated clusters. "I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe," Ioannidis told Nature. "Those with greater than 25 percent self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed."

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