Euromediterranean biomedical journal: A new policy about self-referencing

Abstract

The median self-citation rate of a researcher normally ranged between 10% and 25%. Recent works demonstrated that, among a list of around 100,000 researchers worldwide, hundreds of authors have collected more than a half of their work citations from themselves or their co-authors. During last years, EuroMediterranean Biomedical Journal progressively sought to improve the quality of the manuscripts published, introducing the requirement for all articles to be written in English and, before acceptance, to undergone to a native English speaker proof-reading process from 2012. Moreover, a new publishing layout and a renewed web-portal of the journal were introduced in 2017, representing a further upgrade after over 10 years of editorial activity. Finally, a renewed Editorial Board was designated in 2018. Nowadays, for the first time, the EMBJ Editorial Board unanimously has established a policy for self-referencing, accepting for peer reviews only manuscript with a number of self-citations no exceeding 25% of total references amount. Moreover, a major attention to consistency and coherence of self-cited references with the issues treated in the manuscript submitted, will be requested during peer-review process.