Why do nearly 45,000 scholarly papers cite themselves?

Why do nearly 45,000 scholarly papers cite themselves?

While thousands of papers cite themselves, the percentage that do so is relatively low. Haunschild & Bornmann/arXiv.org While using bibliometric techniques to measure how disruptive research papers are to their field of study, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann stumbled across a strange phenomenon.  Just under 45,000 academic papers contained citations to themselves, they found. Haunschild and Bornmann — both information scientists at the Max Pl…