Great feedback and discussion everyone.

I think compelling points are being made on removing the explicit self-citation limit. I think what such guidelines are attempting to achieve in other journals is to prevent people churning out papers that only cite themselves in order to bump up their own citations stats.

Perhaps it's possible to reword it as something about publications should not be for the purpose of self-promotion?

As an example, this submission by George Chandy cites a lot of his lab's own work, but then they did discover the protein and the citations are being used appropriately to support statements:
ShK_toxin:_history,_structure_and_therapeutic_applications_for_autoimmune_diseases 

I'll make a similar comment over at the Discussion page for the record.
Thomas

On Thu, 11 Jan 2018 at 09:20 Anne McClanan <anne.mcclanan@pdx.edu> wrote:
Hmmm...chiming in as someone from a humanities discipline, and someone new this process, I had imagined that the lowest hanging fruit in terms of getting contributions from active scholars to the WJH would be asking people to reframe their current research for the journal. Since we follow the standard practice of considering it as plagiarism to recycle prior published work (as per the Originality of publication and plagiarism section of the draft), it doesn't seem very practical to concurrently limit them citing their own work. Isn't the idea that we want the people at the forefront of their topic to be contributing? 
Again, I might be missing something in the discussion since I'm new to the editorial board, but phrasing such as "self-promotion" seems to render problematic something that I would take to be business as usual.
All best,
Anne


On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 2:32 AM, Frances Di Lauro <frances.dilauro@sydney.edu.au> wrote:
Dear all

Excellent recommendations Ian. Could "self-promotion" which does imply publicity, be used rather than "self-citation"?

All the best
Frances



________________________________________
From: wjhboard@googlegroups.com [wjhboard@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Ian Alexander [iany@scenarioplus.org.uk]
Sent: 10 January 2018 02:51
To: Thomas Shafee
Cc: wjmboard; WJS board; WJHboard@googlegroups.com; WikiJournal (currently at Wikiversity); WikiJSci@googlegroups.com; wijoumed@googlegroups.com; WikiJHum mailing list
Subject: Re: WikiJournal ethics statement

Thomas, colleagues,

the draft statement seems very much along the right lines.

One thing that stands out as needing attention is the statement "Authors
are recommended to avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation." This
is vague. If it's only a recommendation then authors are permitted to
ignore it. The central terms "excessive" and "inappropriate" are currently
undefined. Perhaps "excessive" could be defined explicitly as applying to
more than x% of the text; another definition could be more than y% of the
citations. If the meaning of "inappropriate" is different from
"excessive", I'd take it to imply "for publicity" or more generally for
any purposes (such as promoting a product or service) other than
Wikiversity's.

All this would give us a draft wording along the lines of

* "Authors must avoid self-citation for publicity or any purposes other
than Wikiversity's.
* Self-citations should not apply to more than [x]% of the text.
* Further, self-citations should not form more than [y]% of the list of
citations."

I don't think we can sensibly use "must" in the second and third sentences
but they may help co-ordinators to rein in some excesses. An extreme case
is where an author has written a monograph about a rare marine worm, and
there's almost nobody else to cite. The placeholders x and y are
(therefore) not easy to specify but 30% might be a practical
starting-point for most topics.

I have very slightly copy-edited one sentence to read "Authors should read
sources before citing them, and their statements should accurately
represent the cited sources."

Ian Alexander

> Hello all,
>
> The WikiJournals should soon be implementing a statement of ethics
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement>,
> covering issues such as:
>
>    - plagiarism
>    - misconduct
>    - reviewer confidentiality
>    - harassment
>
> Many of these issues are common to all journals. In addition, a few are
> unique to the Wikipedia-integration features of WikiJournals: large group
> authorship
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Authorship>,
> attribution of content from Wikipedia
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Attribution>,
> and the definition of a preprint server
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement#Wiki_Preprint_definition>
> .
>
> It would be good to have as many eyes cast over it as possible to check
> that we are happy to stand by it. We can also update and amend it over
> time as needed.
>
> Ethics statement draft:
> Wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Draft_of_ethics_statement>
>
> Discussion held here:
> Wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Ethics_statement_updates
> <https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_User_Group#Ethics_statement_updates>
>
>
> All the best,
> Thomas
>


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