A Reputational Study of Academic Publishers

Metz, Paul; Stemmer, John

doi:10.5860/crl_57_03_234

Cited by 21 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Libcitations should also correlate with quality rankings of the presses that publish academic books (Metz & Stemmer 1996;Goodson et al 1999;Lewis 2000;Wiberley 2002Wiberley , 2004. Similar quality rankings of academic journals (East 2006;Mingers & Harzing 2007;Haddow 2008) have proved controversial (see, e.g., Corbyn 2008a.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences

White

Boell

et al. 2009

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

104

102

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Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the "libcitation count." This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world, e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers. From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a matchup between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had thehighest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000-2006. We present each book's raw libcitation count, its rank within its LC class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLC's WorldCat.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences

White

Boell

et al. 2009

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

104

102

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show abstract

“…They found that collection development librarians held university presses in high regard, with librarians in their sample consistently ranking university presses at the top in terms of familiarity, relevance, and quality. 7 Other studies have examined measures of circulation and reached similar conclusions: scholars in humanities fields use items published by university presses regularly. One study focusing on usage of resources in the humanities categorized patron materials requests by publisher.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Publication and Language Trends of References in Spanish and Latin American Literature

Nolen

2014

CRL

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This study examined references found in three journals in the field of Spanish and Latin American literary studies. Few previous studies have examined types of publishers producing highly cited/referenced books. The data indicate that the primary publishers of scholarly monographs referenced in the journals are U.S. university presses, foreign academic trade presses, and foreign popular trade presses. U.S. university presses, foreign academic trade presses, and government entities published most of the volumes of collected essays referenced. Scholarly monographs published outside the U.S. represented the largest proportions of references, with large growth in references to volumes of collected essays published in the United States. References to English-language materials increased significantly from 1970 to 2000.

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“…Metz and Stemmer (1996), for example, surveyed collection development officers in academic libraries about the prestige of different publishers, with university presses being found to be highly regarded. They believed that subject differences, the existence of specialised publishers and the necessarily subjective nature of judgements were all problems for assessing publishers.…”

Section: Publisher Prestigementioning

confidence: 99%