Compared with journal articles, academic books and proceedings papers are underestimated and insufficient in bibliometrics studies. Nevertheless, their impacts are indispensable in the scientific communication. In the present study, we involved citation and altmetric indexes to explore the differences between academic books and proceedings papers from a multidisciplinary perspective. Results revealed that: 1) Scholars from different disciplines tend to select different knowledge carriers according to their needs and feature of their research. 2) Academic books had higher citation and altmetrics impacts than proceedings papers. Specifically, publications in MED had the best performance. 3) Of all fields, citation and altmetric indexes of books were more concentrated than those of proceedings papers. Differences also existed among six fields. 4) Citation correlated weakly with altmetric indexes of books and proceedings papers in all six fields. This study is a constructive attempt to exhibit traits of two underestimated document types on the disciplinary dimension. Altmetrics data was applied to ensure the comprehensiveness of the research
