Towards a ‘Book Publisher Citation Reports’: First approach using the ‘Book Citation Index

Towards a ‘Book Publisher Citation Reports’. First approach using the ‘Book Citation Index’

The absence of books and book chapters in the Web of Science Citation Indexes (SCI, SSCI and A&HCI) has always been considered an important flaw when using this database for bibliometric purposes and especially when assessing fields such as Social Sciences or Humanities in which this publication type plays a major role.

In May 2010 Thomson Reuters, intending to put an end to this long criticism, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair the launch of the long-awaited Book Citation Index and by the way, getting in ahead of the field. The database was finally available in October of that same year indexing 29,618 books and 379,082 book chapters and covering a time period from 2005 to the present (currently it goes back to 2003).

The Book Citation Index opens a new window of opportunities for analyzing these fields from a bibliometric point of view. In this sense, the introduction of books in the Web of Science platform could lead to some kind of Publishers Citation Reports in which scientific publishers would be ranked according to some bibliometric indicator similarly to what the Journal Citation Reports and Journal Impact Factor does.

In this line of thought, we present this working paper (Ec3 Working Paper 7) in which we pose the possibility of drawing an analogy between scientific publishers and journals. To that effect, the main objective is to analyze different impact indicators referred to the scientific publishers included in the Book Citation Index for the Social Sciences and the Humanities and in this way make what we called a ‘Book Publisher Citation Reports’.

REFERENCE:

Torres-Salinas, Daniel; Robinson-García, Nicolás; Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio. Towards a ‘Book Publisher Citation Reports’. First approach using the ‘Book Citation Index’. Ec3 Working Papers, August 2012.