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Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history
Author(s) -
Zuccala Alesia,
Guns Raf,
Cornacchia Roberto,
Bod Rens
Publication year - 2015
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.23267
Subject(s) - citation , library science , publishing , metadata , subject (documents) , scholarly communication , computer science , citation analysis , ranking (information retrieval) , scopus , bibliometrics , journal ranking , information retrieval , rank (graph theory) , world wide web , political science , mathematics , law , medline , combinatorics
This is a publisher ranking study based on a citation data grant from E lsevier, specifically, book titles cited in Scopus history journals (2007–2011) and matching metadata from WorldCat® (i.e., OCLC numbers, ISBN codes, publisher records, and library holding counts). Using both resources, we have created a unique relational database designed to compare citation counts to books with international library holdings or libcitations for scholarly book publishers. First, we construct a ranking of the top 500 publishers and explore descriptive statistics at the level of publisher type (university, commercial, other) and country of origin. We then identify the top 50 university presses and commercial houses based on total citations and mean citations per book ( CPB ). In a third analysis, we present a map of directed citation links between journals and book publishers. American and British presses/publishing houses tend to dominate the work of library collection managers and citing scholars; however, a number of specialist publishers from Europe are included. Distinct clusters from the directed citation map indicate a certain degree of regionalism and subject specialization, where some journals produced in languages other than English tend to cite books published by the same parent press. Bibliometric rankings convey only a small part of how the actual structure of the publishing field has evolved; hence, challenges lie ahead for developers of new citation indices for books and bibliometricians interested in measuring book and publisher impacts.