From the same source.
Journal of Corporate Finance
2009: self-cites: 9%. self-cites used in Impact Factor Calculation: 9%
2008: self-cites: 18%. self-cites used in Impact Factor Calculation: 30%
2007: self-cites: 21%. self-cites used in Impact Factor Calculation: 21%
2006: self-cites: 20%. self-cites used in Impact Factor Calculation: 21%
As a courtesy to those who published prior in the journal, editors will ask the author of the accepted paper whether any prior papers in prior issues of that same journal are directly related and, if so, please consider the cite. But this is gentle support of prior authors rather than a transparent attempt to manipulate citation impact. Comtrast this to the quote for the journal editor.
Over the past few years, JCR has started publishing the "Article Influence Score" of a journal that doesn't suffer from the problem of self-citations and also adjusts a citation by the impact/quality of the journal citing the paper. For example, a citation from Econometrica is weighted more than a citation from Financial Review. If one looks at the ranking of articles in Business-Finance by the Article Influence Score, then JBF drops way down the ranking because self citations are excluded. Overall, the "Article Influence Score" appears to be a much better measure of journal quality than the "Impact Factor."
The article influence score ranking makes a LOT more intuitive sense than the Impact Factor ranking, I just printed out the first page (of 3) Finance Rankings
JFinance
JFE
RFS
in that order, way ahead
JAE - Acct
JFQA
JMonetaryEcon
JAR - Acct
RAST - Acct
FM
TAR - Acct
JIndustrialEcon - ?
JMCB
JFinMarkets
FinStoch -?
JFIntermediation
JCorpFinance
World Bank
Journal Risk Uncertainty
Math Finance
CAR - Acct
A couple of these I have never even seen (?'s, this could be idiosyncratic) but the list as a whole corresponds to what you get by talking to people and observing tenure decisions, imho.
wow... what is your source? 61 percent is very high. do they really ask people to cite their papers? this is a crime.
Yes, they do.
To see the number of self-cites, have a look at Web of Knowledge's Journal Citation Reports (most likely available via your institution). The 2010 impact factor for JBF without self-cites is 0.748.