Hundreds of extreme self-citing scientists revealed in new database
As someone who now works in astronomy, I&#x27;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 &quot;builder&quot; and added as an author to all major project wide papers.<p>Those papers, which tend to be long and full of great stuff, are cited a lot, and have hundreds of authors.<p>I wonder how many of these papers are where the first author has cited other papers where they are the first author.  (Or really, at least the first few authors)  It seems like for the data shown, it is just if anyone in the author list is anywhere in the author list of the citation?<p>Also for some research niches, you may be one of the few people writing papers on a subject.  There&#x27;s no one else to cite.<p>I do think there&#x27;s some very valid points about bringing the person up to speed on previous research that brought them to the current paper.  But I don&#x27;t think those citations should really count as a citation in terms of metrics for how successful a scientist is.<p>To be honest, I find all the metric gaming about number of papers and citations to be ridiculous.  I don&#x27;t hear many people saying they want to write the best paper in their field, or something new.  It all seems to be a numbers game these days.  Academic career growth hacking, if you will.