Customers who cited this item also cited... - Comparing data from Amazon.com with the new Book Citation Index

Abstract

The new Book Citation Index (BCI) was launched by Thomson Reuters in 2011. With it, Thomson aims to complement its range of different publication databases. In November 2011 the BCI included around 27.000 books. Our research-in-progress paper presents first analyses of the data from the BCI like the distribution of subject categories and citations. In addition to these, we also compare the data from the BCI with data from the website Amazon.com. Amazon is the world's largest online retailer with millions of books sold through their catalogue. By matching both data sets, we found that not all of the books that can be found in the BCI are also available at Amazon. Future analyses will include correlations analysis and a comparison of the ranking of different books found in both data sets when sorted by number of citations on the one hand and the "Amazon Best Sellers Rank" on the other hand. Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" -recommendation-system is well known. Comparing it with a book's references and citations we wish to analyse whether or not a correlation exists between the two