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Can the impact of non‐ W estern academic books be measured? An investigation of G oogle B ooks and G oogle S cholar for M alaysia
Author(s) -
Abrizah A.,
Thelwall Mike
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23145
Subject(s) - prestige , citation , sociology , library science , computer science , philosophy , linguistics
Citation indicators are increasingly used in book‐based disciplines to support peer review in the evaluation of authors and to gauge the prestige of publishers. However, because global citation databases seem to offer weak coverage of books outside the W est, it is not clear whether the influence of non‐ W estern books can be assessed with citations. To investigate this, citations were extracted from G oogle B ooks and G oogle S cholar to 1,357 arts, humanities and social sciences ( AHSS ) books published by 5 university presses during 1961–2012 in 1 non‐ W estern nation, M alaysia. A significant minority of the books (23% in G oogle B ooks and 37% in G oogle S cholar, 45% in total) had been cited, with a higher proportion cited if they were older or in E nglish. The combination of G oogle B ooks and G oogle S cholar is therefore recommended, with some provisos, for non‐ W estern countries seeking to differentiate between books with some impact and books with no impact, to identify the highly‐cited works or to develop an indicator of academic publisher prestige.