Gender Differences in Synchronous and Diachronous Self-citations

Citation rates are increasingly used as a currency of science, providing a basis to reward a scientist. Self-citations, an inevitable part of scholarly communication, may contribute to the inflation of citation counts and impose a considerable impact on research evaluation and academic career advancements. Self-citations are classified into two types in this study: synchronous self-citations (self-citations an author gives) and diachronous self-citations (self- citations an author receives). The main objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive gendered analysis of synchronous and diachronous self-citations across all scientific disciplines. For this purpose, citation data of 12,725,171 articles published in 2008-2014 are extracted from Web of Science and are further scrutinized for articles of each gender. The findings reveal that men receive citations from their own papers at a higher rate than their women counterparts. They also tend to give more citations to their own publications. Gender gap in citation impact decreases when first-author’s diachronous citations are eliminated in the impact analysis. However, the gap does not vary when all-authors’ diachronous citations are excluded. The results of this research is important for effective gender-related policy-making in the science and technology arena.