Self-citations and other reference matters

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The International Academy of Nurse Editors, an informal group of colleagues that meets once per year to share new developments in editing of scholarly journals and maintains a Web site for informational purposes, has recently addressed the issue of self-citations. It is an issue that we have agreed to place on the agenda for discussion at the 2005 meeting, so it seems appropriate to bring it to the attention of Applied Nursing Research (ANR) authors, potential authors, and readers at this time. Your input is welcomed.

As noted in a citation study conducted by The Thomson Corporation (2004), the same organization that evaluates scientific journals for their impact factor, self-citation can be considered at many levels. These include author self-citation, journal self-citation, and subject category self-citation. Thompson ISI has published the Journal Citation Report since 1975 and has conducted a recent study to determine the relationship of journal self-citation to impact factor ratings (The Thompson Corporation, 2004). Through the examination of the main scientific journals in their database, ISI concluded that a journal self-citation rate of 20% or less is characteristic of the majority of high-quality journals selected for coverage in Thompson ISI products.

Although currently a small number of nursing journals are rated by ISI, we are proud that ANR is one of the journals included. In a recent informal review of the citations included in articles published in ANR in 2004, we found that the journal self-citation was less than 20%. This review was conducted out of initial curiosity based on the data provided by the 2004 Thompson report. It is not an effort to develop policy for the acceptance of articles. Notation was also made of the number of author self-citations, and again this was low for the 2004 volume of ANR.

Additional questions were raised through our review of the references cited in the 2004 volume of ANR. Most significantly, the large number of references included with each manuscript. At times, authors have cited multiple references when one would suffice. In the future, we will encourage authors to streamline references to be more consistent with the guidelines published in the journal (i.e., references should be generally limited to 15 per article). We realize that this presents a challenge for the authors, but believe that it will serve two purposes: namely, to present the most salient references and to allow us to include more articles per issue. We also know that it will be difficult to implement this guideline. As readers and authors, please be assured that it will be used only as a guideline. Decisions about reference inclusion will continue to be based primarily on the appropriateness of the references to the scientific nature of the study.

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Reference 

1. The Thompson Corporation. Retrieved from, http://www.thompsonisi.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/selfcitationsinjcr.pdf2004;December 11, 2004
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