Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index

Abstract

In this paper we provide the reader with a visual representation of relationships among the impact of book chapters indexed in the Book Citation Index using information gain values and published by different academic publishers in specific disciplines. The impact of book chapters can be characterized statistically by citations histograms. For instance, we can compute the probability of occurrence of book chapters with a number of citations in different intervals for each academic publisher. We predict the similarity between two citation histograms based on the amount of relative information between such characterizations. We observe that the citation patterns of book chapters follow a Lotkaian distribution. This paper describes the structure of the Book Citation Index using 'heliocentric clockwise maps' which allow the reader not only to determine the grade of similarity of a given academic publisher indexed in the Book Citation Index with a specific discipline according to their citation distribution, but also to easily observe the general structure of a discipline, identifying the publishers with higher impact and output.

The Complexity of Measuring the Impact of Books

“…The books indexed in these research platforms are biased towards western nations. An estimated 75 % of the book chapters in the Book Citation Index, for example, were found to be published from the United States and England [11]. To counter the limitation caused by this bias, White et al introduced a measurement called ''libcitation'' to better evaluate the impact of Australian scholars in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.…”

Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 3: books and non standard outputs

“…This could be useful because citations from books have been largely been invisible in traditional citation indexes and the current book citation search facilities in Scopus and WoS cover relatively few books that are predominantly in English and from a small number of publishers, which is problematic for citation impact assessment in book-based disciplines (Gorraiz; Purnell; Glänzel, 2013; Torres- Salinas et al, 2012Salinas et al, , 2013.…”

“…Moreover, the main sources of citations to humanities books are other books (Thompson, 2002;Kousha;Thelwall, 2014). Even today, the Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index and Scopus index a relatively small number of books (60,000 1 and probably 70,000 2 as of July 2015, respectively) and this may cause problems for bibliometric analyses of books (e.g., Gorraiz; Purnell; Glänzel, 2013; Torres- Salinas et al, 2012Salinas et al, , 2013. Expert peer judgment of books seems to be by far the best method but it is even more time-consuming and expensive than article peer assessment because books tend to be longer and some aspects of book impact (e.g., teaching or cultural) could be particularly subjective (see Weller, 2001).…”

Can the impact of non‐Western academic books be measured? An investigation of Google Books and Google Scholar for Malaysia

“…In contrast Torres‐Salinas et al. () used a citation‐based metric with BKCI data to identify the 20 most productive publishers in four disciplines: sciences, engineering and technology, arts and humanities, and social sciences. Another study assessed the proportions of books from a publisher that were indexed in various book databases (Tausch, ).…”