We investigate the changes in the self-citation behavior of Italian professors following the introduction of a citation-based incentive scheme, for national accreditation to academic appointments. Previous contributions on self-citation behavior have either focused on small samples or relied on simple models, not controlling for enough confounding factors. The present work adopts a complex statistics model implemented on bibliometric individual data for over 15,000 Italian professors. Controlling for a number of covariates (number of citable papers published by the author; presence of international authors; number of co-authors; degree of the professor's specialization), the average increase in the number of self-citations per paper following introduction of the national scientific accreditation (ASN) is of 9.5%. The increase is common to all disciplines and academic ranks, albeit with diverse magnitude. Moreover, the increase is sensitive to the relative incentive, depending on the status of the scholar with respect to the ASN. A further analysis shows that there is much heterogeneity in the individual patterns of self-citing behavior, albeit with very few outliers.

我们调查了在引入基于引文的激励​​计划后意大利教授自引行为的变化，以实现国家对学术任命的认可。以前对自引行为的贡献要么集中在小样本上，要么依赖于简单的模型，没有控制足够的混杂因素。目前的工作采用对超过 15,000 名意大利教授的文献计量个人数据实施的复杂统计模型。控制多个协变量（作者发表的可引用论文的数量；国际作者的存在；合著者的数量；教授的专业化程度），引入后每篇论文的自引次数平均增加国家科学认证 (ASN) 为 9.5%。尽管幅度不同，但所有学科和学术等级的增长都是普遍的。此外，增加对相对激励很敏感，这取决于学者在 ASN 方面的地位。进一步的分析表明，尽管异常值很少，但自引行为的个体模式存在很大的异质性。