Relationship Between the Journal Self-Citation and Author Self-Citation and the Impact Factor in Iranian, American ,and European ISI Indexed Medical Journals in 2014-2021
Background: Author and journal self-citation contributes to the overall citation count of an article and the impact factor of the journal in which it appears. Little is known, however, about the extent of self-citation in the general clinical medicine literature. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of self-citation (Journal and Author) on the impact factor of Iranian, American, and European English medical journals. Methods: IF (Impact Factor), IF without self-citations (corrected IF), journal self-citation rate, and author self-citation rate for medical journals were investigated from 2014–2021, by reviewing the Journal Citation Report. Twenty Iranian English medical journals in WoS indexed were selected and compared with twenty American and twenty European English medical journals. The correlation between the journal self-citation and author self-citation with IF was obtained. We used Spearman’s correlation coefficient for correlation of self-citation and IF. A P. value of0.05 was considered as significant in all the tests. Results: The overall journal citations were higher in the American and European journals compared to the Iranian ones between 2014 and 2021. There was a significant relationship between journal self-citation rates and impact factor (P