Virtually all rankings of journals are based on citations, including self citations by journals and individual academics. The gold standard for bibliometric rankings based on citations data is the widely-used Thomson Reuters Web of Science (2014) citations database, which publishes, among...

The premise underlying the use of citations data is that higher quality journals generally have a higher number of citations. The impact of citations can be distorted in a number of ways. Journals can, and do, inflate the number of citations through self citation practices, which may be...