The nature of self-citation is not unequivocal as it fluctuates across the borders of approbation and condemnation. While it is tenable that scholars tend to build upon and thus appeal to their previous work, excessive self-citation is considered as a likely strategic tool to showcase one’s achievement, inflate citations, and distort bibliometric indices. The present study aimed to explore how self-citation may affect hot paper designation in Web of Science (WoS) in a short-term citation window. To this end, we studied the self-citation behavior of the authors contributing a sample of hot papers in a select number of journals over two consecutive periods. The cited and citing papers were analyzed in terms of synchronous and diachronous self-citations as well as co-authorship and co-citation networks. The results showed that self-citation evidently proved problematic in as short a citation window of hot papers as two months. The results also suggested that including too many cited references in a given article might be a potential strategy to inflate citations. Thus, we suggest that hot paper designation should assume sensitivity to self-citation, or at least, excessive self-citations by either ruling them out or setting limits on how often an author can reasonably cite earlier works. Still, this is not an attempt at policing excessive self-citation practice of a group of authors and by no means intends to criticize the authors; rather, we aimed to cite an example of how excessive self-citation practice may distort the original agenda of a bibliometric designation in WoS, hot papers.

中文翻译：

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热门论文有多热？多产和自引堆叠问题

自引的性质并不明确，因为它跨越了认可和谴责的边界而波动。虽然学者倾向于建立并因此吸引他们以前的工作是站得住脚的，但过度的自引被认为是展示个人成就、夸大引用和扭曲文献计量索引的一种可能的战略工具。本研究旨在探讨自引如何影响 Web of Science (WoS) 在短期引用窗口中的热门论文指定。为此，我们研究了作者在连续两个时期内在选定数量的期刊上贡献热门论文样本的自引行为。根据同步和历时自引以及合着和共引网络对被引和被引论文进行分析。结果表明，在短短两个月的热点论文引用窗口内，自引显然存在问题。结果还表明，在给定的文章中包含过多引用的参考文献可能是一种夸大引用的潜在策略。因此，我们建议热点论文的命名应该假设对自引敏感，或者至少是通过排除它们或设置作者可以合理引用早期作品的频率来限制过度自引。尽管如此，这并非试图监管一群作者的过度自引行为，也绝非批评作者的意图；相反，我们的目的是举一个例子，说明过度的自引实践可能会如何扭曲 WoS、热门论文中文献计量指定的原始议程。