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Abstract
In July, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), a publisher-advisory body in London, highlighted extreme self-citation as one of the main forms of citation manipulation. A 2016 preprint, for instance, suggested that male academics cite their own papers, on average, 56% more than female academics do2, although a replication analysis last year suggested that this might be an effect of higher selfcitation among productive authors of any gender, who have more past work to cite3. Ioannidis says that it's possible to account for some systematic differences by comparing researchers with the average for their country, career stage and discipline. According to Baass data, Russia and Ukraine stand out as having high median self-citation rates (see 'Country by country').