Insights into the relationship between the h‐index and self‐citations

We analyze the publication output of 119 Chilean ecologists and find strong evidence that self‐citations significantly affect the h ‐index increase. Furthermore, we show that the relationship between the increase in the h ‐index and the proportion of self‐citations differs between high and low h ‐index researchers. In particular, our results show that it is in the low h ‐index group where self‐citations cause the greater...