Exploring the dynamics of external and self-citations and their role in shaping scientific impact

Understanding the mechanisms driving the distribution of scientific citations is a key challenge in assessing the scientific impact of authors. We investigate the influence of the preferential attachment rule (PAR) in this process by analysing individual citation events from the DBLP dataset and two Scopus-based datasets, enabling us to estimate the probability of citations being assigned preferentially. Our findings reveal that, for the aggregated dataset, PAR dominates the citation distribution process, with approximately 70% of citations adhering to this mechanism. However, analysis at the individual level shows significant variability, with some authors experiencing a greater prevalence of preferential citations, particularly in the context of external citations. In contrast, self-citations exhibit notably different behaviour, with only 20% following PAR. We also demonstrate that the prominence of PAR increases with an author's citability (average citations per paper), suggesting that more citable authors are preferentially cited, while less-cited authors experience more random citation patterns. Furthermore, we show that self-citations may influence bibliometric indices, such as the h-index. Our results confirm the distinct dynamics of self-citations compared to external citations, raising questions about the mechanisms driving self-citation patterns. These findings provide new insights into citation behaviours and highlight the limitations of existing approaches.