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Journal article
Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v 60(6), pp 1083-1096
01 Jun 2009
Abstract
Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the "libcitation count." This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world (e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers). From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a match-up between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had the highest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000 to 2006. We present each book's raw libcitation count, its rank within its Library of Congress (LC) class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLC's WorldCat.
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Details
- Title
- Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Creators
- Howard D. White - Drexel Univ, Coll Informat Sci & Technol, Philadelphia, PA 19301 USASebastian K. Boell - Univ New S Wales, Bibliometr & Informetr Res Grp, Sydney, NSW, AustraliaHairong Yu - Univ New S Wales, Bibliometr & Informetr Res Grp, Sydney, NSW, AustraliaMari Davis - Univ New S Wales, Bibliometr & Informetr Res Grp, Sydney, NSW, AustraliaConcepcion S. Wilson - Univ New S Wales, Bibliometr & Informetr Res Grp, Sydney, NSW, AustraliaFletcher T. H. Cole - Univ New S Wales, Bibliometr & Informetr Res Grp, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Publication Details
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v 60(6), pp 1083-1096
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Number of pages
- 14
- Grant note
- Metcalfe Memorial Fund at the University of New South Wales
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- [Retired Faculty]
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000266303800001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-66149112493
- Other Identifier
- 991019168585604721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- International collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Information Systems
- Information Science & Library Science