Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time

How common is self-citation in scholarly publication, and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a data set of 1.5 million research papers in the scholarly database JSTOR published between 1779 and 2011, the authors find that nearly 10 percent of references are self-citations by a paper's authors. The findings also show that between 1779 and 2011, men cited their own papers 56 percent more than did women. In the last two...