While reading one paper a day, something that has surprised me is finding authors citing themselves. I’m not referring to building on previous experiments, although I’ve encountered that, too. Those types of references are unsurprising.

However, some authors write papers refuting other papers, and they cite their own papers as proof that “I’m right and you’re wrong.” While there may be legitimate examples of that, it sure comes across as bias: “here are my past conclusions agreeing with my current assertions.”

I’ve also seen more extreme examples of argument building. An author might release multiple papers, all citing each other and all building upon each other, until there is one final paper that seems to be heavily supported. However, the majority of the support seems to be from the same author. Instead of writing one paper with everything in one place, an author might write many minor papers in future support of one major paper.

These are both lessons in what not to do when writing your own papers.