Analysis of self-citation and impact factor in dermatology journals

Background Concerns have been raised regarding the impact factor's (IF) accuracy and credibility, which may be affected by different factors, including self-citations. Objective To investigate the self-citation rate (SCR) of dermatology journals and its relationship to the IF. Methods Data on all dermatology journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) were retrieved, and the following parameters were analyzed: IF, total publications used to calculate the IF, total citations used to calculate the IF, self-citations used to calculate the IF, SCR, and IF without self-citations (corrected IF). Results The median SCR was 10.53% (0-50%), and the median IF and corrected IF, 1.54 (0.05-6.37) and 1.35 (0.03-5.84), respectively. There was an inverse correlation between the IF and the SCR. A statistically significant difference was noted in the SCR between general and subspecialty journals and between journals that offered a full English text and those that did not. Conclusions In general, the IF of dermatology journals is not influenced by the SCR. However, journals with a lower IF tend to have a higher SCR. Subspecialty journals and foreign language journals have a higher SCR than general dermatology and English language journals, respectively, probably owing to their limited distribution and the difficulty experienced by international authors in accessing references in specific languages.