Book reviews in humanities research evaluations

FSW - CWTS - Ou

Book reviews in humanities research evaluations

FSW - CWTS - Ou

Reviewing, indicating, and counting books for modern research evaluation systems

In this chapter, we focus on the specialists who have helped to improve the conditions for book assessments in research evaluation exercises, with empirically based data and insights supporting their greater integration. Our review highlights the research carried out by four types of expert communities, referred to as the monitors, the subject classifiers, the indexers and the indicator constructionists. Many challenges lie ahead for scholars affiliated with these communities, particularly the latter three. By acknowledging their unique, yet interrelated roles, we show where the greatest potential is for both quantitative and qualitative indicator advancements in book-inclusive evaluation systems.Comment: Forthcoming in Glanzel, W., Moed, H.F., Schmoch U., Thelwall, M. (2018). Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators. Springer Some corrections made in subsection 'Publisher prestige or quality

Review of national and international initiatives on books and book publishers assessment

This article presents various systems for assessing academic books and/or book publishers in several European countries and two in Latin America. It has been structured according to the methodologies used in each system: expert opinion, reviews, holdings in academic libraries, specialization, original selection procedures, citations, and systems integrating different variables. The objective is to offer a panoramic view for evaluators, authors, librarians, and editors to use in decision making. Also included are conclusions about various assessment systems, their potential, and the optimum conditions for their use in practice

Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index

Complementary Material to this study can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/10481/22587.In this paper we provide the reader with a visual representation of relationships among the impact of book chapters indexed in the Book Citation Index using information gain values and published by different academic publishers in specific disciplines. The impact of book chapters can be characterized statistically by citations histograms. For instance, we can compute the probability of occurrence of book chapters with a number of citations in different intervals for each academic publisher. We predict the similarity between two citation histograms based on the amount of relative information between such characterizations. We observe that the citation patterns of book chapters follow a Lotkaian distribution. This paper describes the structure of the Book Citation Index using ‘heliocentric clockwise maps’ which allow the reader not only to determine the grade of similarity of a given academic publisher indexed in the Book Citation Index with a specific discipline according to their citation distribution, but also to easily observe the general structure of a discipline, identifying the publishers with higher impact and output.This research was sponsored by the Spanish Board for Science and Technology (MICINN) under grant TIN2010- 15157 co financed with European FEDER funds

PlumX As a Potential Tool to Assess the Macroscopic Multidimensional Impact of Books

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frma.2017.00005/ full#supplementary-material.The main purpose of this macro-study is to shed light on the broad impact of books. For this purpose, the impact of a very large collection of books (more than 200,000) has been analyzed by using PlumX, an analytical tool providing a great number of different metrics provided by various tools. Furthermore, the study also describes the changes in the values of the most significant measures and indicators over time. The results show that the usage counts in comparison to the other metrics are quantitatively predominant. Catalog holdings and reviews represent a book’s most characteristic measures deriving from its increased level of impact in relation to prior results. Our results also corroborate the long half-life of books within the scope of all metrics, excluding views and social media. Despite some disadvantages, PlumX has proved to be a very helpful and promising tool for assessing the broad impact of books, especially because of how easy it is to enter the ISBN directly as well as its algorithm to aggregate all the data generated by the different ISBN variations