It seems that it is possible (to some extent at least) to exclude self-citation in Google Scholar, this is how:
- Search for author name in the usual way
- Click “cited by number“
- Identify how Google Scholar represents the name you want to exclude in the hits (typically “A Name”)
- Add a standard Google query string which excludes the name you identified in point 3 to your current citation url in the following format &q=-“A Name”
A practical example of removing self-reference: Aspects of the theory of syntax by N Chomsky without self citation:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7563750853896762876&hl=en&as_sdt=2000&q=-“N Chomsky”
This reduces the original number of hits from “around 12,350” to “around 11,600”.
Perhaps this is useful? Feedback?
Tags: citation, Google Scholar, library
Infonatives 
2010-08-6 at 11:34
Hi,
In relation to your comment, we have observed the same, especially given the last modifications made to the scholar engine. We developed a simple front-end java tool to do this, i.e. exclude self-citations from scholar results. It is available here:
http://www.cawec.org
and is free (no installation needed and no advertisements).
Best,
Yiannis
2010-08-30 at 20:31
You can just check “search within results” and type in -“N Chomsky”. Should give you the same result. Unfortunately, it also gets rids of every result where anyone mentions “N Chomsky” including in acknowledgments, for example.
Do you have a way around this?
2010-11-27 at 10:19
Now, yes. Then, no 🙂 This article is out of date 🙂
2010-09-1 at 9:19
Hi,
Yes.
As we mention in the manual instructions of our tool at http://www.cawec.org
you can do -author:”F. Last1″ -author:”F. Last2″ …
to request that all authors are excluded.
To get the list of all the authors of a paper, you have to request from Google Scholar the bibtex file corresponding to the publication you want.
Since this can be cumbersome to do for multiple papers (and for papers with many authors!), our tool does exactly this but in an automated manner, i.e. you just select the paper you want and it does the rest.
It can give you the the resulting pages from Google Scholar directly, or it can parse them for you in a report with the external (non-self) citations. Finally, there is also the option to exclude the authors first initial and search with exclusion of only last names.
Best,
Yiannis
2010-09-1 at 9:21
Just to add to this that with the “author” tag, only the citing papers with the selected names within their author list are excluded and not citing papers that simply mention the name(s) in their text.
2012-05-25 at 1:56
I tested this program but it does not work. It always returns that it did not met the selected criteria, or the right keywords, etc.
2012-05-26 at 20:36
Many thanks for your comment. We have been working to fix our application. The problem you mention was because Google Scholar recently did a major update and changed the HTML code of the results pages, thus making our application not work anymore.
If you check at http://www.cawec.org, the new version is now available and fixes these problems.
It also gives the option now to save the summary results in report format in a PDF file. The PDF file includes hyperlinks that open the full results in your browser.
We shall be providing more options within the next 5-6 weeks and will be releasing the updated CAWEC app on the site, as always free to use for all.
Your feedback will be highly appreciated!
Yiannis
2012-11-28 at 18:22
I tried to get a report by cawec 3.0 by excluding self citations, it does not work. Is there a new bug ?
2012-12-29 at 11:19
Thanks for your interest. Google Scholar changed the html encoding and we had to apply some fixes.
The new version is now available and works, please visit http://www.cawec.org to download it. Please let us know if you see further problems with the new version and we shall try to resolve them as soon as possible.