Self-citation in order to enhance a journal's impact factor is certainly an abuse, well worth controlling and exposing.
Self-citation to enhance an individual's citation count is futile. Personal citation statistics, used in performance evaluation, can easily be processed to cull out self-citations. And at the individual level, self-citation can be entirely legitimate -- drawing attention to the author's work that is relevant to (and may have been ignored by) the target research field. If there are citation circles doing mutual back-scratching among co-authors, that too is becoming increasingly detectable and name-and-shameable, especially in the Open Access era. (The online digital online medium and the power of computation do make many forms of abuse possible, but open access also provides equally powerful means to expose and punish them: hence, once exposed as exposable, they are likely to become their own deterrents.) http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5497.html Stevan Harnad On 2012-04-10, at 6:41 AM, Philip Davis wrote: > Emergence of a Citation Cartel > 10 April, 2012 > The Scholarly Kitchen > http://wp.me/pcvbl-6xS > > "In a 1999 essay published in Science titled, ?Scientific Communication ? A > Vanity Fair?? George Franck warned us on the possibility of citation cartels > ? groups of editors and journals working together for mutual benefit. To > date, this behavior has not been widely documented; however, when you first > view it, it is astonishing." >