Dear Stevan: In a recent article Peter Jacso estimated that there are over 100,000,000 "orphan" cited references in the WebofScience. That number is similar to the one I estimated for the number of cited references to books and other non journal references. While I applaud the goal of producing book-to-book citation indexes I question whether that will really change the metrics for most books, especially well cited ones.
What is the average number of books that will cite the average scholarly book.? On the other hand the number of citations to books in journal articles may often if not always much larger than book-to-book citations. think that the citation indexes been vastly underutilized. In my own experience it has been quite easy to measure the citation impact of significant books using the WOS files, especially if one is careful to look for the variations in citing the book title. I am surprised at how few have been the studies of these metrics. Even when we have the book citation index scholars should also be aware of the many imporant book reviews that are published. Tens of thousands of these reviews are indexed as sources in the SSCI and AHCI. It is of course distressing to hear social scientists repeat the myth that you can't measure the citation impact of a book because they are not treated as sources in the ISI indexes. Gene Garfield When responding, please attach my original message __________________________________________________ Eugene Garfield, PhD. email: [email protected] home page: www.eugenegarfield.org Tel: 215-243-2205 Fax 215-387-1266 Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3302 President, The Scientist LLC. www.the-scientist.com 400 Market Street, Suite 1250, Philadelphia, PA 19106-2501 Past President, American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) www.asist.org ____________________________________________________________________________ From: American Scientist Open Access Forum [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 10:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics For full text click here SUMMARY: Unlike with OA's primary target, journal articles, the deposit of the full-texts of books in Open Access Repositories cannot be mandated, only encouraged. However, the deposit of book metadata + plus + reference-lists can and should be mandated. That will create the metric that the book-based disciplines need most: a book citation index. ISI's Web of Science only covers citations of books by (indexed) journal articles, but book-based disciplines' biggest need is book-to-bookcitations. Citebase could provide that, once the book reference metadata are being deposited in the IRs too, rather than just article postprints. (Google Books and Google Scholar are already providing a first approximation to book citation count.) Analogues of "download" metrics for books are also potentially obtainable from book vendors, beginning with Amazon Sales Rank. In the Humanities it also matters for credit and impact how much the non-academic (hence non-citing) public is reading their books ("Demotic Metrics"). IRs can not only (1) add book-metadata/reference deposit to their OA Deposit Mandates, but they can (2) harvest Amazon book-sales metrics for their book metadata deposits, to add to their IR stats. IRs can also already harvestGoogle Books (and Google Scholar) book-citation counts today, as a first step toward constructing a distributed, universal OA book-citation index. The Dublin humanities metrics conference was also concerned about other kinds of online works, and how to measure and credit their impact: Metrics don't stop with citation counts and download counts. Among the many "Demotic metrics" that can also be counted are link-counts, tag-counts, blog-mentions, and web mentions. This applies to books/authors, as well as to data, to courseware and to other identifiable online resources. We should hasten the progress of book metrics, and that will in turn accelerate the growth in OA's primary target content: journal articles, as well as increasing support for institutional and funder OA Deposit Mandates.
