Self-citations are references to articles from the same journal. Self-citations often make up a significant portion of the citations a journal gives and receives each year. You can compare self-citing rates and self-cited rates to supplement your journal evaluation.

Calculate the Self-Citing Rate for a Journal

1. Access a Journal page.

2. Click the Citing Journal Data button to display the Citing Journal Table.

3. Look in the All Journals row at the top of the table. Write down the value that appears in the All Years column.

4. In the Cited Journal column, find the title that matches the title of the Citing Journal. Write down the value that appears in the All Years column.

5. Divide the total number of times the journal cited itself (step 4) by the number of total cites (step 3) and multiply by 100. The result is the percent of references in the journal to articles published in the same journal.

Calculate the Self-Cited Rate for a Journal

1. Access a Journal page.

2. Click the Cited Journal Data button to display the Cited Journal Table.

3. Look in the All Journals row at the top of the table. Write down the value that appears in the All Years column.

4. In the Citing Journal column, find the title that matches the title of the Cited Journal. Write down the value that appears in the All Years column.

5. Divide the total number of times the journal cited itself (step 4) by the number of total cites received (step 3) and multiply by 100. The result is the percent of all references to the journal from articles published in the same journal.

For another perspective on journal usage and performance, you may wish to recalculate impact factors without self-cites and note any changes in rank. This is of special interest if your evaluation includes any cited-only journals because self-cites from these journals are not included in the JCR database.

Recalculate an Impact Factor without Self-Cites

1. Print the template at the bottom of this Help page.

2. Access a Journal page.

3. Click the Cited Journal Data button to display the Cited Journal Table.

4. Look in the All Journals row at the top of the table. Note the values in the 5th and 6th columns. (For example, if the JCR year is 2004, column 5 is 2003 and column 6 is 2002.) Enter those values in column A in the template below.

5. In the Citing Journal column of the Cited Journal Table, find the entry with the same journal title as the journal you are currently viewing. Note the values in the 5th and 6th columns of the table. Enter those values in column B of the template below.

6. Click the Return to Journal button to return to the Full Record page.

7. Click the Impact Factor value link to display the Impact Factor data.

8. Write down the number of Recent Articles Published (for both years) in Column D of the template below. Calculate the total of row D.

9. Subtract the figures in Column B from those in Column A to get the number of cites to recent articles minus self-cites. Place these values in Column C, then add the two values in Column C to get their total.

10. Divide the figures in Column C by the article counts in Column D in the template below to calculate the impact factor without self-cites.

You may wish to use the impact factor without self-cites to rank all the journals in a subject category or other filtered set. It may be of interest to note any changes in rank for smaller subspecialty journals or for any cited-only journals.

How To:

• Calculate Self-Citing Rate
• Calculate Self-Cited Rate
• Recalculate Impact Factors Without Self-Cites