Correlation between Self-Citation and Impact Factor in Iranian English Medical Journals in WoS and ISC: A Comparative Approach

Background: In this study, the impact of self-citation (Journal and Author) on impact factor of Iranian English Med-ical journals in two international citation databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic world science citation center (ISC), were compared by citation analysis. Methods: Twelve journals in WoS and 26 journals in ISC databases indexed between the years (2006-2009) were se-lected and compared. For comparison of self-citation rate in two databases, we used Wilcoxon and Mann-whitney tests. We used Pearson test for correlation of self-citation and IF in WoS, and the Spearman‘s corre-lation coefficient for the ISC database. Covariance analysis was used for comparison of two correlation tests. P. value was 0.05 in all of tests. Results: There was no significant difference between self-citation rates in two databases (P>0.05). Findings also showed no significant difference between the correlation of Journal self-citation and impact factor in two databases (P=0.526) however, there was significant difference between the author‘s self-citation and impact factor in these databases (P<0.001). Conclusion: The impact of Author‘s self-citation in the Impact Factor of WoS was higher than the ISC.