Caspian Journal of Scientometric

Background and aim: Self-citation is an important challenging issue in evaluating the scientific outputs. The aim of this study was to assess analytically the relationship between the quality and self-citation in Persian Humanities Journals based on Persian Journal Citation Reports (PJCR) in the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC).

Material and methods: Citation analysis method was used in the present study and 67 Persian Humanities Journals indexed in the ISC database with impact factor.

Findings: The results showed that the average self-citation rate for humanities sciences journals with selected impact factors in 2010 was 24.45% in 2001- 2010. After analytical assessment of 67 reviewed journals, 23 of them had self-citation rate of 20% and less than 20%, and 20 of them had self-citation rate of more than 20%. Furthermore, results showed that the Impact Factor, Immediate Index, Matthew Value and the Proportion of Citing to their Articles with eliminating the effective self- citation in the four and combined indicators had decrease, increase and no changes in 65.91%, 19.35% and 14.72% of journals, respectively. In addition, with eliminating the self- citations, the citation value of 56.51% of the journals decreased, of 32.78% had no changes and of 3.94% of the journals reached to zero.

Conclusion: There was positive and significant relationship between the self-citation and the quality of journals. Therefore, it is needed to determine a policy for the rate of self-citation on the behalf of editorial board to reduce it and to cite by the other journals.