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How to handle self-citation in manuscripts?

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

How should one handle self-citation in manuscripts prepared for double-blind peer review?

Phrases like “as I have argued elsewhere…” might reveal who the author is. I saw people replacing their names with “Author (year)”, but this can be transparent in context such as a sentence like “for details, see Author (xxxx)”. People familiar with the literature (who are supposed to be reviewers) can easily know who this is.

Should one engage with one’s own prior work entirely in the third person throughout the draft? If so, do journals allow authors to change back to the first person perspective after the review process, during proofreading or copyediting?

Another reader added:

I would also like to know the answer to this, since, I now have a view that is distinct in the niche my work fits into, and I am somewhat senior enough that I have enough publications to self-cite. When I have not cited myself adequately, I have received reviewers reports telling me to cite my own work more, and in some cases, suggesting that maybe I don’t understand what my own view actually is …..

It is becoming quite an irritating feature.

Good questions. We have discussed this at the blog in the past, and my recollection is that the general consensus was to cite oneself in the 3rd person. But, as the OP notes, even that can give away one’s identity–so it seems to me that the best policy is to cite oneself in the 3rd person but also do so in an understated way that does not make it clear that you’re the author of the paper. Not sure if this is always feasible, but I don’t know any other better solution.

What do readers think?

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16 responses to “How to handle self-citation in manuscripts?”

  1. Anonymous

    Yes, I think the best thing to do is to refer 3rd personally, writing it as if you are someone else citing you, doing it just enough or or with enough detail to avoid people thinking you don’t understand your own views. You can even toss in remarks that might throw them off your scent (e.g.: “Smith 2019 takes up this question but fails to consider x, y, and z.”).

    Once accepted, you can always go back to re-write some of it using some 1st person language, if it sounds strange to publish it that way.

    Reply
  2. Daniel

    If the citation cannot be omitted I cite myself in third person.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    To answer the question about whether this can be changed after the fact – yes, you can change this sort of thing when you get the proofs, and I have done so recently. I actually added in a whole new sentence; following a sentence saying one could argue xyz, I then added a sentence saying and I have in fact argued xyz elsewhere.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    To answer Op’s question, many journals (not all) would not allow changing back to first-person citations during the copyright editing, so you would end up with third person in the publication. This is fine, I think, and proper. Authors are no longer giant units who spread thoughts over many work. Each paper is an absolute unit. It really doesn’t matter the paper you cite is written by you or someone else.

    Reply
    1. Anon

      I’ve never heard of any journal doing this. Can you give some examples?

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        In recent years, all journals I submitted to are like this. Here’s the concrete process, to illustrate what I mean: after R&R, when the paper is accepted, there is no final round of R, but the paper is directly sent to copyediting. When copyediting is done, which usually take a while, there are a number of specific queries to which I need to respond. I cannot change anything else other than copyediting mistakes. As a result, third-person references remain as they are.

        A few years ago, I do remember I was asked to de-anonymize.

      2. Anonymous

        I don’t like when someone refers to themselves in the third person in a published paper. It’s awkward and confusing to drop a citation as if it’s someone else with the same last name.

        Also, I disagree with the “no longer giant units” comment. Yes, many philosophers don’t operate in that way anymore, but there certainly are cases where, for practical considerations, someone publishes a series of papers that could have been a book together, or part of a book, and there is value in the author cross-citing themselves in the different papers and commenting on the relation between the different papers “from the inside” and not just as a neutral observer.

    2. Anonymous

      I’ve always been able to make changes like this at the stage of checking the copyedited proofs. In fact, I’ve had papers where it had to be done because whole sentences/passages had to be redacted from the submitted version for anonymity. This happens, for instance, when publishing methodological statements or acknowledgments related to uses of empirical data, ethics approval, participating in specific joint meetings/research groups, etc etc where including all the relevant information would clearly identify your institution and/or identity. This is information that needs to be included in the publication and thus its inclusion must be allowed at the copyediting stage.

      For context I’m a philosopher of science who has sometimes worked with empirical data, so this specific issue may not apply to most philosophers, but this is just to illustrate that it *has* to be possible to de-anonymize papers at the copyediting stage.

      As far as things like a simple citation of your own paper being in the first or third person in the final version, I don’t really care about this. I think it can be awkward when there are whole lengthy passages interacting with your past writing as if you were a different person, but I’m also not going to lose sleep over an awkward passage of philosophical writing.

      Reply
    3. Anon

      In literally every platform I’ve used you answer the queries and make your own revisions to any errors or wording changes you like. This has never been a problem for me. (I’ve added sentences and even a paragraph before.) So, this just strikes me as incorrect.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        It looks like my experience is the minority here! So the OP should feel free to ignore. For the record I haven’t submitted to journals for two years now and maybe my memory is blurry, or maybe the journals I submitted really were special. Also, none of the journals is generalist. So, if I am wrong, thanks everyone for correcting me. And if I am not, take it as one data point.

  5. Anonymous

    This actually happened to me very recently. I’m not famous by any means so your mileage may vary. It was totally fine for me to say explicitly “There is X, which I have discussed in a previous work (author, year).” I think even during the peer review process I let the reviewer know that something they talk about was discussed in a previous paper I wrote as part of the debate in question (while still keeping it anonymous though). I de-anonymized it during the copyediting afterward.

    I must disagree with the other commenter who says that papers are singular absolute units. At least in continental philosophy, it totally makes sense to build your views (and the debate) over more than one paper. Literally the point of papers is to engage in a debate with others so it makes sense that you’re building something unfinished. This is also the case when you look at new PhDs who do thesis by articles.

    Anyway, I would say don’t be afraid to use first person pronoun and just hide your name. Be upfront if your paper is directly related to previous work. If anything, the editors would let you know. I’ve heard that eventually most people in the literature on your topic gets to know you so as you progress you can’t fully escape the anonymity 100%, though by that time it’s also understood that you can be trusted to produce high quality work as well.

    Reply
  6. Charles Pigden

    ‘Authors are no longer giant units who spread their thoughts over many works’? ‘Each paper is an absolute unit’? Anonymous may not be such a giant unit and their papers may be totally self-contained, but this certainly isn’t true of me. Many of my papers relate to ongoing research projects that I have been carrying on for *decades*. I often want to cite earlier papers in which I take myself to have proved (or at least argued for) claims that need to the taken for granted in the papers that I am working on at the moment. (Otherwise the current papers would swell to an inordinate length.) Furthermore in some of my papers I am engaging with critics of my earlier work, critics who in some cases cite more than one of my papers. So as an author I can reasonably claim to be a ‘giant unit who spreads his thoughts over many works’. Indeed since I have several such research projects, I count as not just one, but at least two, such giant units. It is true that my off-piste papers (that is papers not closely related to my main research interests) constitute ‘absolute units’ but in those papers the issue of self-citation does not arise. Now Anonymous might object that boomer philosophers such as myself (I am nearly seventy) may constitute giant units, but this isn’t true of the younger generation. The giant thought-spreading units are dying out to be replaced by younger philosophers whose papers, if they could talk, could say of themselves, like Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester, ‘I am myself alone’. But that’s not true either. I can think of plenty of philosophers, a generation or more younger than myself who also have large research programs with interdependent publications thereby qualifying as giant thought-spreading units. It is not just boomers but also millennials (and for all I know Gen-Z philosophers) who spread their thoughts across many papers.

    Okay, so given that some of us are indeed giant units and given that the second of the OPs is well on the way to becoming one (hence their problem with referees who complain about the lack of references to the OP’s previous work), what is the right policy to adopt wrt self-citations?

    If you are well-known within a given area (whether niche or not) it is highly likely that competent referees will recognise you however much you anonymise your texts. So do the minimum to meet the formal requirements of the journal in question. Write ‘As I argue in XXXX’ , omitting the paper XXXX from the bibliography. (Don’t leave blotted out references in the right place in your alphabetically ordered bibliography – that really would be too much of a give-away!) This won’t stop competent referees from guessing at your identity, but at least you won’t be rubbing it in their faces. It is not your job to make your identity unguessable (which may well be impossible anyway); it is only your job not to advertise it.

    Suppose you are a young philosopher whose work is relatively unknown? Adopt the same strategy. You won’t be advertising your identity and you may have made it unguessable, but at the same time you will be making it clear that you have written on the topic before.

    Suppose you are in OP#2’s position. Competent referees are aware of your work but you are not so well-known or don’t have such a distinctive style and such a distinctive set of opinions that they can easily guess at your identity. You are getting irritated by lectures from referees telling you off for not citing yourself. For people like OP#2 I still think that the same strategy applies. If you write ‘As I say in XXXX’ or ‘as I argue in YYYY’ (omitting these items from the bibliography) they won’t know for sure that it is you. But when they notice that your name is missing from the bibliography, and are thinking of telling you off because of its absence, they may well wonder if XXXX and YYYY are the papers that they were initially inclined think you should have been citing and therefore hold their hoity-toity hands. At the very least they should be typing comments like ‘If the author isn’t Bloggs maybe they should be looking at Bloggs paper Z which is missing from the bibliography’. A bit annoying perhaps, if you really are Bloggs, but a lot less annoying than if you were getting a talking to for your deplorable ignorance of Bloggs’s work.

    Remember the point of anonymity is not to make people think that it is NOT you that wrote the paper. The point is NOT to make them think that it IS you.

    Does the fact that it is often possible to guess at the identities of established figures give them an advantage? Yes (though this cuts both ways as there may be some referees who hate the establishment). But the only way to avoid this is to enforce a grey uniformity of style and character, carefully suppressing any taint of of literary individuality and to only write papers that are ‘absolute units’. To my mind this would be highly undesirable.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    Re: the suggestion that authors cite themselves in the 3rd person, *but only to the extent that their self-citations leave their identity non-obvious*: is it really such a big deal if a reviewer infers your identity from a 3rd person citation? (For example, I’m thinking about cases where your new paper builds upon your previous work in an important way, so you cite your previous work in the 3rd person, but it makes it fairly obvious that you’re the same author.) If your identity is made fairly obvious by a 3rd person, what’s the big deal? Is it enough of a problem to outweigh the importance of properly citing your own work (and drawing out the connections between your work, and how you’re building on your previous work, and so on). It strikes me that the importance of properly citing your own work outweighs any costs of implicitly revealing your identity – am I missing anything here?

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    I’ve never heard of a journal not letting you change back to first person after acceptance. Every time I had a paper accepted, I needed to edit to change it to the house style afterwards, and that was when I changed to first person when needed, and that’s also the time for putting in the acknowledgements. I also used that opportunity to fix typos no one else noticed, and to add another citation when I only came across a relevant paper after submission.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    I dislike citing myself in third person in initial submissions to journals. I always feel like it might give away my identity to referees, not only for reasons stated by the OP, but also because I’m not a well-known researcher and my not-well-known name tends to stand out in citation lists that mostly just include well-known names. So what I’ve sometimes done — and no editor or referee has ever had a problem with it — is this: I’ve simply added a footnote at the very end of my paper that says that there are a couple places in the paper where I will add self-citations if my paper is eventually accepted for publication. It’s not a perfect solution. But it has worked whenever I’ve done it. I’m not saying it’s a better way to handle things than citing oneself in third person. But it is another option to consider.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Maybe citing a bunch of other not-well-known names can help too

      Reply

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