Investigation of national self citation and related attitudes of physicians in turkey originated otorhinolaryngology publications

Aim In this cross-sectional study, it is aimed to analyze the national self-citation status and related attidudes of Turkish otolaryngologists in Turkey originated national and international Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) publications. Materials and Methods In the first stage of the study, four Turkish ORL journals and in the second stage, SCI indexed ORL journals were manually scanned in terms of citations made by Turkish authors to the articles written by Turkish authors. In the third stage, the journals published by national ORL associations in five selected countries were scanned. In these journals, the articles written by local authors between January 2015 - December 2018 were also scanned for citations made by local authors. In the fourth stage, the questionnaires dated December 2016 and January 2019 were analyzed to evaluate the attitudes of Turkish ORL physicians towards national self-citation. In the last stage Turkey was compared with other countries in terms of number of publications and citations made to these publications. Results In Turkish national ORL journals, it was found that the ratio of citations from Turkish authors to the publications written by Turkish authors was 10-20% in the mentioned years. While the average ratio of citations made by Turkish authors to the articles written by Turkish authors in the ORL journals included by SCI was 10.32%, the average citation ratio was 0.96% for the articles published in Turkish national ORL journals with Turkish authors. In the national ORL journals of Japan, Brazil, Italy, India and Iran average national self-citation rates were found as 26.03%, 22.05%, 18.93%, 8.34%, 11.03%, respectively. In the questionnaires applied to Turkish ORL physicians in two different time periods, it was noted that in general there was no enthusiasm nor effort to cite national ORL publications with Turkish authors. In the last stage it was found that among all countries, Turkey was in the 7-19 rank in terms of number of ORL publications but in 67-179 rank for the citations per articles. Conclusion In this five-stage study, it was seen that Turkish ENT physicians did not show bias in terms of national self-citation and contrarily they were far behind in citing publications belonging to the national ENT journals. It was noted that the most important reasons for the small number of references to national ENT journal publications were the difficulty of searching the national ENT literature and the lack of confidence in national publications. Finally, it was found that although our country is in a good place in terms of ENT publication numbers in the world, the number of citation per document which is considered a very important criterion for demonstrating publication quality is far behind.