Library Guides: Cited Reference Searching: A How-To Guide: Self-citations

Need to eliminate self-citations?

We regularly get asked for information on how to eliminate self-citations from search results.

For those who have a small number of citations (or who are regularly the first author on a paper) this can easily be done by visually scanning through the results list and deleting self-citations. Those who have a longer scholarly record or are not the first author (such as papers first-authored by graduate students) will find it a bit more difficult to eliminate self-citations.

Within the Web of Science and Scopus it is possible to do this by knowing where it is hidden within these databases.

Web of Science:

Run an author search and pull the results up on the screen.
Scroll down and look for Citation Network box (in right sidebar) and click on View Citation Report.
Note the Citing Articles and Times Cited boxes offer "without self-citation" options.

Scopus:

Run an author search and click on the name of the author to bring up their Author Profile page.
Below the citation trends graph, click on Analyze Author Output.
Scroll down to the h-index graph box and click on it.
Exclude self-citations is a link above the graph.

Google Scholar: It is not possible to eliminate self-citations in an author profile directly; however, this feature is available using the free Publish or Perish software.

Publish or Perish
This is free, downloadable software that is available for individual, non-profit use. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting into other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis). The data is extracted from Google Scholar by default and not only provides a list of publications with citation counts and access to those works, but also includes statistical data including the h-index. Supports Author Impact and also Journal Impact search and analysis.