Self citations have so far been excluded from citation count. It is widely believed that such self citations do not have any significance than merely to increase the citation count of the article and improve the prestige of the author through citation count.

Self citations should not always be avoided as the article may have been cited for genuine reasons. Analysis of self-citations helps in evaluating continuing research as well.

This paper argues that self-citations must not be blindly excluded in citation counts when evaluating prestige value of a research paper/author. Experiments conducted on researcher’s self-citation dataset reveal that most self-citations show marginal improvement thus establishing researcher progress in the respective area of research.