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Comment by greeneggs | Hacker News Reader

In the methods section, they do say that "first author self-citations were excluded." One of the figures in the Nature article also pulls out self-citations.

https://arxiv.org/abs/0809.5250

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Do note however that many times the first author is not the principal investigator (ie the person that has the funding for the study and is often tenure track faculty) but is often a graduate student or a post-doc. The principal investigator may be in the middle or even at the end of the author list. Thus just excluding first author self-citations is probably inadequate. The chances are high that a grad student or post-doc is going to cite their adviser's previous papers.

The rule to read the author list, simplified: first author did the work. Last author funded the research. Everyone else contributed somewhat.

That’s only true in some areas (e.g. some biological fields). In other areas (e.g astronomy or much of physics), it’s decreasing order of contribution. In mathematics, the author list is usually alphabetical.

It is also traditional that the first author, in addition to doing the most of the scientific work, takes on most of the writing He/She also edits together the various other authors contributions.

One metric used to evaluate publication history is the combined count of first and last authorships for this very reason.

So if a pair of researchers work on a set of papers, all they have to do is alternate the first author position? Then they never self-cite even if they cite their own work 10 times in a row.

Yes, but for hiring or tenure the researchers are always being evaluated by others in the field, so there would be a human sanity check.

Plus in practice as others have alluded to it's usually Prof. Alice's lab, where grad students Bob, Cindy, Dave and Evelyn each pursue their own corner of the research, and they're all on each paper with the first author designated appropriately.

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