How to avoid the 'Jesus multiplying bread and fish' myth and 'Münchausen baron bootstrap' legend in individual bibliometric indices: a simple bimedian method applied to Italian ASPA academic members.

How to avoid the "Jesus multiplying bread and fish" myth and "Münchausen baron bootstrap" legend in individual bibliometric indices: a simple bimedian method applied to Italian ASPA academic members Dear Editor in Chief, Over a decade ago we assessed the status of the bibliographic indicators of ASPA members (Pulina and Francesconi [10]) and since then much water has passed under the bridge of bibliometric science. Based on the weak or null correlation amongst the indicators above discussed, I have developed some bimedian graphs that can help to discriminate high shared authorship and high self-citation ratio as the worse position in the bibliometric space of the scientific careers of academic ASPA members. Conclusions The ASPA community exhibits a good scientific performance with high values of the main bibliometric indicators, obviously greater for the older compared to the younger scientists, with a limited number of co-authors per paper and a low degree of self-citations. [Extracted from the article]