Impact of the Spanish Library and Information Science journals and impact of self-citation on their H-index

The number of citations article paper receives serves as an indicator of its impact in the scientific community. This paper performs an analysis of the impact of the most frequently cited papers published in two Spanish Library and Information Science journals included in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and determines the influence of self-citations on their H index. Results show that the papers are cited largely by Latin-American authors and journals with little international impact, whose scant impact, in fact, is almost entirely due to papers written in English included in the journal. The most frequently citing journals for both papers are the Mexican journal Investigación Bibliotecológica, the Spanish journals, El Profesional de la Información (EPI), and Revista Española de Documentación Científica (REDOC), and the international journal Scientometrics. The self-citation rate of these journals and authors is very high (40%); and the elimination of self-citations impacts the H-index while yielding a more objective, realistic measures of impact.