Self-citation is a very good thing
How can a publication tell a story if the authors steer away the history of their ideas?
As academics we are often trained to avoid self-promotion. We recognize that our work is built by standing on the shoulders of giants, and we cite prior work not so much as a matter of humility, but to promote accuracy, allocate credit where it is due, and to show the history of ideas. I think a lot of us are averse to self-promotion because the most successful masters of this craft are often harmful and shoddy academics. Reading that prior sentence probably brought a couple specific people to your mind, right? Me too. (Here are the ones that I was thinking of, by the way.)
If we think of self-citation as a form of self-promotion, then we can’t ignore the highly gendered dynamics. There’s quite a literature on this! If you dip your toe in, you’d see that while men might self-promote more than women, women are often legitimately concerned that being perceived as a self-promoter will result in more negative judgements relative to men who self-promote. This is why I think it’s important that we have some more open conversations about self-citation, as both the frequency of self-citation as well as the cultural response to the performance of self-citation is a situation that unfairly favors men.
While promoting yourself to the point that you’re failing to lift up others is problematic, we shouldn’t avoid talking about ourselves to the point where we are intentionally steering away from citing our own work in our own publications. It’s entirely legit to cite your own work in your own papers, insofar as the papers that you’re citing led to the work that you’re presenting. Your name is at the top of the paper. It’s your story. It’s okay to put yourself in the center because you’re the one writing the paper!
Do I have a beef with someone who throws citations of all of their papers into their new papers simply because they can? Well, sure, a little bit. “Citation stacking” is clearly improper. But if the earlier paper is cited as a part of the authors explaining why the present study came to happen? That’s fine with me. Self-cite away. I think self-citation is only problematic if authors do this without citing equally or more relevant work by others. And of course if it is tied to structural under citation of people because of their identity, seniority, where they live, the implied ethnicity of their last names, and such. We should go out of our way to include others in the broader research community, and I don’t think self-citation is a practice that gets in the way of this goal.
Self-citation is not so much matter of self-promotion, but rather an inherent part of storytelling. Scientific papers are, at their heart, a form of show-and tell, an adult version of a science fair project. While good science and good communication needs more than a good storyline, it’s an important component of drawing an audience into your work, and helping them see why it’s compelling1. Now that we seem to be getting over this weird obsession with the passive voice in scientific papers, we can recognize that we ourselves are a part of the research, and by telling the story of an experiment, we talk about what we learned to bring this experiment into place. A experiment might be about a membrane protein or fluctuating asymmetry or phytogeography, but really it’s about a team of people who are studying those things and the history of the(ir) ideas that led them to do this work.
If you’re reluctant to cite a bunch of your papers, then I think you can get over this not by cutting back on your own papers, but by leaning into citing papers by other people that make a difference to the field and aren’t getting the attention they deserve.
I think this issue about self-citation has gotten conflated with ego, homophily, and nepotism because citations have emerged as a very coarse and widely used surrogate for scientific impact, which is yet another situation where once a metric has become a target then it becomes a problem that generates harmful incentives. If we think of citations as simply a component of the narrative, then a lot of that baggage disappears. Nonetheless, when people are excluded from their own disciplines because some people in the field are not going to the trouble of reading and citing their work (and this is a non-random process and guess who gets marginalized), then this reflects what happens in all other aspects of our job, and that’s always a thing to work on.
I think I got an early lesson in this which led to some early imposterism. When I was, like, 15, I had a notably okay but clearly unexceptional science fair project in my junior year of high school. I wasn’t asking a new or valuable research question and was simply applying a well-established technique (to measure water hardness) to a well-understood system (sources of water in the municipal water supplies in the region) to learn nothing new at all. And the methods weren’t even robust in any way, compared so some other friends of mine whose projects were, in my opinion at the time, objectively better. But I ended up building a rather large and attractive display for my project that was effective at telling the story of the project. It looked good at first glance, and when asked about it, I could talk about it clearly. So while other students had much better science, it wasn’t as easily communicated, so I ended up advancing in local science fairs and ended up going to the International Science and Engineering Fair in 1988 in Knoxville TN (the first time science paid for my travel, huh), and crashed and burned there as a “finalist” which is what they call everybody who goes. I learned then — and haven’t really seen anything since to convince me otherwise — that a compellingly told story often makes pedestrian things seem impressive when they clearly are not. Anyhow, nowadays I’m sour on science fairs for a couple good reasons and generally avoid them.