EUROMEDITERRANEAN BIOMEDICAL JOURNAL: A NEW POLICY ABOUT SELFREFERENCING

The median self-citation rate of a researcher normally ranged between 10% and 25%. Recent works

demonstrated that, among a list of around 100,000 researchers worldwide, hundreds of authors have

collected more than a half of their work citations from themselves or their co-authors. During last

years, EuroMediterranean Biomedical Journal progressively sought to improve the quality of the

manuscripts published, introducing the requirement for all articles to be written in English and,

before acceptance, to undergone to a native English speaker proof-reading process from 2012.

Moreover, a new publishing layout and a renewed web-portal of the journal were introduced in

2017, representing a further upgrade after over 10 years of editorial activity. Finally, a renewed

Editorial Board was designated in 2018. Nowadays, for the first time, the EMBJ Editorial Board

unanimously has established a policy for self-referencing, accepting for peer reviews only

manuscript with a number of self-citations no exceeding 25% of total references amount. Moreover,

a major attention to consistency and coherence of self-cited references with the issues treated in the

manuscript submitted, will be requested during peer-review process.