A study of Effect of Author Self-Citation on Impact Factor in Iranian English medical journals in WoS and ISC

The production of Every country`s Medical journals is one of the sign of health development in it. The number of citations in international indexing is a sight of its important in distribution of health information. The rate of self-citations is more been seen. There، the aim of this study had been the comparison of Author self-Citation effect on Impact Factor in Iranian English medical journals in Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC).

By citation analysis، 12 journals in WoS and 26 in ISC were studied from 2006 to 2009. Impact Factors were extracted from JCR، and self-Citaions were obtained by looking of citations in every database and imported to spread sheets. Impact Factor without self-citation recalculated. Data analyzing tool was SPSS software 20 edition. Wilcoxon test was used for comparison of self-citation rates in common journals، and for uncommon journals Mann-whiteny test was used. For correlation test of Author self-citation with IF in WoS Pearson test was used. Because of skewed data in ISC، Spearman test was used. The comparison test of correlation between two databases was Covariance test.

There wasn’t any significant deference between Author self-citation rate in two databases (p>0. 05). In WoS، the correlation between Author self-citation and Impact Factor was near to meaning surface (p=0. 06، r=0. 69). The correlation was not meaning in ISC (p>0. 05، rsp =0. 06). There was significant deferent between the relations of Author self-citation and impact factor in two databases (p<0. 001).

The effect of Author self-citation in increasing of IF is more significant in WoS. Author self-citation must be decreased to show the really journal´s impact.