Assessing the citation impact of books: The role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus

Kayvan Kousha, Mike Thelwall and Somayeh Rezaie

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2011, vol. 62, issue 11, 2147-2164

Abstract: Citation indictors are increasingly used in some subject areas to support peer review in the evaluation of researchers and departments. Nevertheless, traditional journal‐based citation indexes may be inadequate for the citation impact assessment of book‐based disciplines. This article examines whether online citations from Google Books and Google Scholar can provide alternative sources of citation evidence. To investigate this, we compared the citation counts to 1,000 books submitted to the 2008 U.K. Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) from Google Books and Google Scholar with Scopus citations across seven book‐based disciplines (archaeology; law; politics and international studies; philosophy; sociology; history; and communication, cultural, and media studies). Google Books and Google Scholar citations to books were 1.4 and 3.2 times more common than were Scopus citations, and their medians were more than twice and three times as high as were Scopus median citations, respectively. This large number of citations is evidence that in book‐oriented disciplines in the social sciences, arts, and humanities, online book citations may be sufficiently numerous to support peer review for research evaluation, at least in the United Kingdom.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21608

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:11:p:2147-2164

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().