Jahani Mohammad Ali, Yaminfirooz Mousa
General Education Department, School of Medicine, Babol University of Medical Sciences, Babol, Iran.
Acta Inform Med. 2016 Dec;24(6):401-404. doi: 10.5455/aim.2016.24.401-404.
Self-citation is one of the main challenges in the evaluation of researchers' scientific output. This study aimed at comparing the institutional self-citation among the universities located in Northern Iran.
This study was conducted as a scientometric study. Research population included all scientific productions of 16 Northern Iran Universities with at least 100 indexed documents indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) by 2 June 2015. The citation analysis section of WoS was used for data collection. SPSS was applied for data analysis. Study hypotheses were tested with two independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test.
Producing 16,399 papers, northern Iran universities had 5.33% of contribution in Iran's scientific production. They received 84,058 citations with 17% and 12% of self-citations belonged to the non-medical and medical universities, respectively. Testing hypotheses revealed that increase in received citations significantly increases the rate of self-citation and increase in scientific production does not necessarily increase the rate of self-citation.
The rate of self-citation in the studied universities was not relatively high. However, investigating into the factors affecting the rate of and motives for self-citation needs further research.
自引是评估研究人员科研产出的主要挑战之一。本研究旨在比较伊朗北部各大学的机构自引情况。
本研究作为一项科学计量学研究开展。研究总体包括2015年6月2日之前在科学引文索引（WoS）中至少有100篇索引文献的伊朗北部16所大学的所有科研成果。使用WoS的引文分析部分进行数据收集。运用SPSS进行数据分析。研究假设通过两独立样本t检验和配对样本t检验进行验证。
伊朗北部各大学共发表16399篇论文，占伊朗科研产出的5.33%。它们共获得84058次引用，其中非医学类大学和医学类大学的自引率分别为17%和12%。假设检验表明，获得的引用次数增加会显著提高自引率，而科研产出的增加不一定会提高自引率。
所研究大学的自引率相对不高。然而，对影响自引率及其动机的因素进行调查还需要进一步研究。
