The menace of self citation: An audit of two years from journals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

OBJECTIVE: To assess the author and journal self-citation amongst journals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study conducted from January 2021 to July 2021. In total, manuscript published in 10 journals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, either recognized by the Higher Education Commission or Pakistan Medical Commission, in the years 2018 and 2019 were included in the present research. All types of manuscripts were analyzed using a pre-designed data extraction table. Results were extracted, analyzed and appropriate statistics were applied. RESULTS: About 1235 manuscripts published in 68 issues over a period of two years’ time were analyzed. The majority of manuscripts were 1039 (84.1%) original articles followed by case reports 90 (7.3%). Author self-citation came out to be 11.26% and journal self-citation was 6.5%. The same institute’s author affiliation came out to be 40.6%. CONCLUSION: The trend of author self-citation was found to be high while that of journal self-citation was low when compared with already prevalent literature.