Table 1.
Brief review of the key literature.
Fig 1.
Flow chart of the data retrieval, selection and analysis.
Table 2.
Most productive journals with at least 600 COVID-19 publications indexed in the Web of Science 2020–2023.
Fig 2.
Correlation matrix of journal self-citations in COVID-19 research with other indicators.
Note. SC, self-citation; Pub, publication; Cit, citations; SCPub, self-citation per publication; Pcited, % documents cited; IF, impact factor; CNCI, Category Normalized Citation Impact; JNCI, Journal Normalized Citation Impact; Top1, % documents in the top 1%; Top10, % documents in the top 10% of highly cited papers.
Fig 3.
Lollipop charts of journals with the highest self-citation rates (A) and self-citation per publication (B) in COVID-19 research.
Fig 4.
Violin plots of journal self-citation rates in COVID-19 research according to the type of publication.
Fig 5.
Violin plots of journal self-citation rates in COVID-19 research according to the most productive publishers: ranking 1st-6th (A) and ranking 7th-12th (B).
Table 3.
Comparison of journal self-citations in COVID-19 with other infectious diseases.