Curious case of self-citations and how to monitor self-citers?
I don't think there is a good way around self-citations, since most of the time, your current research builds upon your previous research, and therefore, your previous research (or that of your collaborators) is relevant to your current research. However, from my experience, self-citations form a small part of the overall number of citations.

Assuming the author's group is not the only one working on a topic, there seem to be two other problems here:


other people don't seem to cite his work, which could mean that he is ignored, his work isn't visible or his work is just not good and/or relevant enough.
basing quality on number of citations is flawed. The number of citations is closely related to an authors H-index, which is criticized regularly. The same criticism should be valid for number of citations.


To tackle the "problem" of self-citations (I would not say this is a problem in the majority of cases), some citation-based measures are based on citations excluding self-citations. This does of course get tricky when collaborators are citing someone's work, but the large bulk of self-citations will be removed this way.