Re: Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics

From: <eugene.garfield_at_THOMSONREUTERS.COM>
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 17:04:27 -0500

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:  garfield_at_codex.cis.upenn.edu 
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:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 10:32 AM
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
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.
Received on Mon Nov 03 2008 - 23:36:45 GMT