As we know, citation counts are important to judge one's research activity. Is it good to cite one's previous works? Will it be viewed as an act of advertisement or self-promotion?
Answer
Although it's true that citations are always helpful, there are obviously limits. If the majority of your citations are self-citations, that's usually considered a "red flag." If your paper that came out two years ago has 10 citations, and two or three are from within your group, nobody's really going to have a problem with that. But if your paper gets cited 45 times, and 40 of them are you citing yourself, that's not so good.
Citation counts not being "in sync" with the journals they're published in are also problematic. Publishing in no-name, third-tier journal X, your paper is probably unlikely to generate many citations. It looks suspicious when such papers get many citations.
But again, much of this can be sorted out by a judicious use of search tools like Web of Science or Scopus.
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