To self-cite or not to self-cite

Raheem Kherani and Michelle Fung note that we referenced one of our own publications in our recent article about self-citation.¹ In fact, we acknowledged this (in the second paragraph of the Interpretation section of that article), as an example of the necessity or utility of self-citation. However, Kherani and Fung have calculated the rate of self-citation incorrectly. Author self-citations, as described in our article, are subsequent citations to an article by one of its authors. Thus, our citation of the paper by Montori and colleagues² raised the self-citation count of that article by 1, but it did not affect the citation count of our present article.¹ Calculating the proportion of self-citations to the latter would involve dividing the number of our subsequent publications that cite it by the total number of subsequent publications that cite it.

Apoor S. Gami Victor M. Montori Department of Internal Medicine Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Rochester, Minn. R. Brian Haynes Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics McMaster University Hamilton, Ont.