Re: Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:04 PM, <eugene.garfield_at_thomsonreuters.com> wrote:
> Dear Stevan: In a recent article Peter Jacso estimated that there are over
> 100,000,000 "orphan" cited references in the WebofScience.
Dear Gene, I presume that "orphan" citations means citations BY works
that are indexed in WoS TO works that are not indexed in WoS (many of
them books).
> 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.
I suspect you are right, overall (and I've made much the same bet
myself). (Compare a book/book citation count to a journal-article/book
citation count, and they will turn out to be highly correlated in most
fields, depending on how book-based a field is.) But that's why I
think it's a better idea to use a whole battery of metrics, rather
than just one or a few. All metrics need validation, against what they
are meant to predict, field by field, and then it is just a matter of
calibrating their weights: In some fields book/book citation counts
may have the same predictive power as article/book (or even
article/article) citation counts, and in other fields they may have
some independent predictive power of their own.
> What is the average number of books that will cite the average scholarly book.?
That depends on the field, but of course it is not the absolute number
of citations that matters, but the predictive power of the variance,
for example, in predicting RAE peer rankings within a field.
> On the other hand the number of citations to books in journal articles may
> often if not always be much larger than book-to-book citations.
That again depends on the field. In the humanities, some scholars have
told me with great conviction that only books matter, not journal
articles. (They probably did not have book *citations* in mind, just
book "influence" and usage, as well as book reviews. But there too I
would bet that book citations are highly correlated with influence and
usage, as long as we compare only within the same field or subfield,
like with like. It is still an empirical question, though, as you say,
whether in those same fields article/article and/or article/book
citations would not prove just as predictive as book/book citations.
> I 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.
You are right that the existing WOS article/book citation counts have
been underutilized and should be tested against article/article
citation counts, as well as whatever criterion they are used to
predict, field by field.
> 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.
Book review counts will no doubt be useful -- though text-mining and
semiometrics might be even more useful there.
> 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.
Agreed (but that does not mean it would not be useful to collect
book/book citations too, by the means I suggested: self-archiving book
metadata plus reference lists!)
Best wishes,
Stevan
> From: 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
>
> 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 Tue Nov 04 2008 - 00:52:44 GMT
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