Science is a cumulative activity, which can manifest itself through the act of citing. Citations are also central to research evaluation, thus creating incentives for researchers to cite their own work. Using a dataset containing more than 63 million articles and 51 million disambiguated authors, this paper examines the relative importance of self-citations and self-references in the scholarly communication landscape, their relationship with the age and gender of authors, as well as their effects on various research evaluation indicators. Results show that self-citations and self-references evolve in different directions throughout researchers' careers, and that men and older researchers are more likely to self-cite. Although self-citations have, on average, a small to moderate effect on author's citation rates, they highly inflate citations for a subset of researchers. Comparison of the abstracts of cited and citing papers to assess the relatedness of different types of citations shows that self-citations are more similar to each other than other types of citations, and therefore more relevant. However, researchers that self-reference more tend to include less relevant citations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of self-citations in scholarly communication.

翻译：科学是一种累积性活动，这可以通过引用行为得以体现。引用也是科研评价的核心，因此激励研究者引用自身成果。本文利用包含超过6300万篇论文和5100万个消歧作者的数据集，考察了自引和自我引用在学术交流图景中的相对重要性、其与作者年龄和性别的关系，以及对各类科研评价指标的影响。结果表明，自引和自我引用在研究者的职业生涯中呈现不同的演变方向，男性与年长研究者更倾向于自引。虽然自引对作者的引用率平均仅有较小至中等程度的影响，但对部分研究者而言，其高度膨胀了引用指标。通过对比被引论文与施引论文的摘要以评估不同引用类型的相关性，发现自引类论文间的相似度高于其他引用类型，因此其相关性更强。然而，自我引用较多的研究者往往引用的相关度较低。本文最后讨论了自引在学术交流中的作用。