Citation and self-citation rates of Iranian and Turkish journals indexed in ISI

In recent years,the growth rate of scientific production is increasing noticeabley.Citationanalysis is currently one of the most widely used metrics for analyzing the scientific contribution of anyunits. Self-citation is a common practice but it can differ between disciplines, countries and journals. Inthis study we evaluated the impact factor (IF), citations and self-citations of Iranian and Turkish journalsindexed in Web of Science based on the Journal Citation Report(JCR) 2012.We used the ISI-database journal citation report from Thomson-Reuters, JCR 2012, to collectjournals impact factors, number of articles, number of citations and self-citationsfor both Turkey and Iran from2009 to 2010 (which was used to calculate the impact factor of 2011). The mean, median and percentilesof each variableswere compared between countries using theIndependent Student t-test or Mann-Whithney U test in the case of violation of normal distribution. In addition therelationship between thenumber of publicationsand impact factor was studied by using the pearson correlation coefficient.Based on the 2012 JCR report, the total number of Iranian and Turkish articles were 4017 and 7260respectively and themean self-citations were 26% for journals from both countries. The median of total IFwas greater in Iranian journals as opposed to the Turkish one’s, 0.466 vs 0.349. The figure was similar forIF without self-citations, 0.330 vs 0.243, however both differences were statistically non-significant, pvalues> 0.05.A significant correlation was seen between the number of published articles and IF withoutself-citationsfor Iranian journals, r=0.342 and p-value=0.034.Although self-citation is quite high in both countries, Iranian journals had higher IF (total and withoutself-citation) compared to the Turkish journals.

کلیدواژه ها:

Citation ، self-citation ، Iranian journal ، Turkish journal ، ISI