Book reviews in humanities research evaluations

Abstract

Bibliometric evaluations of research outputs in the Social Sciences and Humanities are challenging due to limitations associated with Web of Science data; however background literature shows that scholars are interested in stimulating improvements. We give special attention to book reviews processed by Web of Science History and Literature journals, focusing on two types: Type I (i.e., reference to book only) and Type II (i.e., reference to book and other scholarly sources). Bibliometric data are collected and analyzed for a large set of reviews ) to observe general publication patterns and patterns of citedness and co-citedness with books under review. Results show that reviews giving reference only to the book (Type I) are published more frequently, while reviews referencing the book and other works (Type II) are more likely to be cited. The referencing culture of the Humanities makes it difficult to understand patterns of co-citedness between books and review articles without further in-depth content analyses. Overall, citation counts to book reviews are typically low, but our data show that they are scholarly and do play a role in the scholarly communication system. In the disciplines of History and Literature, where book reviews are prominent, counting the number and type of reviews that a scholar produces throughout his/her is a positive step forward in research evaluations. We propose a new set of journal quality indicators for the purpose of monitoring their scholarly influence.

Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index

“…The main reason and limitation for this is that there has not been an international and reliable multidisciplinary database with citation data. At the same time many approaches have been made using as a proxy their presence in libraries (White et al, 2009;Torres-Salinas & Moed, 2009;Linmans, 2010), book reviews (Zuccala & van Leeuwen, 2011) or other alternative databases as Google Books or Google Scholar (Kousha & Thelwall, 2009;Kousha, Thelwall & Rezaie, 2011), but none of them has been adopted unanimously by the bibliometric community. A possible reason for the lack of adoption of such measures may rely on the difficulty and time consuming efforts needed to obtain large data sets.…”

Uso del Web of Science para el estudio de disciplinas minoritarias en Humanidades: el caso del folclore

“…La naturaleza prolífica de las reseñas de libros es superior al porcentaje total en el A&HCI. Según Zuccala y van Leeuwen (2011), en el periodo 1981-2009 este porcentaje fue aproximadamente del 45 %. En el mismo periodo de tiempo, el presente estudio encontró que alcanzaba el 57 %.…”

“…Desglosado, el 38.3 % de los artículos han sido citados y en cambio solamente el 6.9 % de las reseñas. Situaciones análogas con gran presencia de reseñas de libros y, por contra, una ratio baja de ítems citados ya había sido observada en el caso de la literatura y de la historia (Zuccala y van Leeuwen, 2011).…”

The future of research assessment in the humanities: bottom-up assessment procedures

“…However, Hammarfelt (2016: 115) observes a shift from investigating coverage issues towards studying the characteristics of SSH publication practices and developing bibliometric approaches sensitive to the organization of SSH research fields. This includes, but is not limited to, extending bibliometric analyses to non-source items (Butler and Visser, 2006;Chi, 2014) or the relatively new Book Citation Index (Gorraiz et al, 2013), using other databases like Google Scholar (Kousha and Thelwall, 2009) or data from social media services, the so-called altmetrics (Holmberg and Thelwall, 2014;Mohammadi and Thelwall, 2014;Zuccala et al, 2015;Zuccala and Cornacchia, 2016), analysing the inclusion in library catalogues (White et al, 2009), exploring national databases with full coverage , extending data to references in research grant proposals (Hammarfelt, 2013) or to book reviews (Zuccala and van Leeuwen, 2011;Zuccala et al, 2015), exploring collaboration (Ossenblok and Engels, 2015) and publication patterns (Chi, 2012;Ossenblok et al, 2012;Verleysen and Weeren, 2016). From a more pragmatic point of view, attempts are made to "weigh" the various outputs, such as journals or books in the SSH, similar to the journal impact factor, commonly used in the sciences (Giménez-Toledo, 2016).…”