IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v126y2021i2d10.1007_s11192-020-03814-w.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Exploring WorldCat identities as an altmetric information source: a library catalog analysis experiment in the field of Scientometrics

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Torres-Salinas

    (University of Granada)

  • Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado

    (University of Granada)

  • Mike Thelwall

    (University of Wolverhampton)

Abstract

Assessing the impact of scholarly books is a difficult research evaluation problem. Library Catalog Analysis facilitates the quantitative study, at different levels, of the impact and diffusion of academic books based on data about their availability in libraries. The WorldCat global catalog collates data on library holdings, offering a range of tools including the novel WorldCat Identities. This is based on author profiles and provides indicators relating to the availability of their books in library catalogs. Here, we investigate this new tool to identify its strengths and weaknesses based on a sample of Bibliometrics and Scientometrics authors. We review the problems that this entails and compare Library Catalog Analysis indicators with Google Scholar and Web of Science citations. The results show that WorldCat Identities can be a useful tool for book impact assessment but the value of its data is undermined by the provision of massive collections of ebooks to academic libraries.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Torres-Salinas & Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Mike Thelwall, 2021. "Exploring WorldCat identities as an altmetric information source: a library catalog analysis experiment in the field of Scientometrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1725-1743, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03814-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-020-03814-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-020-03814-w
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-020-03814-w?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Torres-Salinas, Daniel & Moed, Henk F., 2009. "Library Catalog Analysis as a tool in studies of social sciences and humanities: An exploratory study of published book titles in Economics," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 9-26.
    2. Diana Hicks, 1999. "The difficulty of achieving full coverage of international social science literature and the bibliometric consequences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 44(2), pages 193-215, February.
    3. Éric Archambault & Étienne Vignola-Gagné & Grégoire Côté & Vincent Larivière & Yves Gingrasb, 2006. "Benchmarking scientific output in the social sciences and humanities: The limits of existing databases," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 68(3), pages 329-342, September.
    4. Kayvan Kousha & Mike Thelwall, 2016. "Can Amazon.com reviews help to assess the wider impacts of books?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(3), pages 566-581, March.
    5. Howard D. White & Sebastian K. Boell & Hairong Yu & Mari Davis & Concepción S. Wilson & Fletcher T.H. Cole, 2009. "Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(6), pages 1083-1096, June.
    6. Howard D. White & Alesia A. Zuccala, 2018. "Libcitations, worldcat, cultural impact, and fame," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 69(12), pages 1502-1512, December.
    7. A. J. M. Linmans, 2010. "Why with bibliometrics the Humanities does not need to be the weakest link," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 83(2), pages 337-354, May.
    8. Mu‐hsuan Huang & Yu‐wei Chang, 2008. "Characteristics of research output in social sciences and humanities: From a research evaluation perspective," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 59(11), pages 1819-1828, September.
    9. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolás Robinson-Garcia & Juan Gorraiz, 2017. "Filling the citation gap: measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1371-1384, December.
    10. Simon Wakeling & Paul Clough & Lynn Silipigni Connaway & Barbara Sen & David Tomás, 2017. "Users and uses of a global union catalog: A mixed-methods study of WorldCat.org," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 68(9), pages 2166-2181, September.
    11. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2017. "ResearchGate versus Google Scholar: Which finds more early citations?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(2), pages 1125-1131, August.
    12. Alesia Zuccala & Mads Breum & Kasper Bruun & Bernd T. Wunsch, 2018. "Metric assessments of books as families of works," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 69(1), pages 146-157, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eleonora Dagienė, 2024. "Mapping scholarly books: library metadata and research assessment," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(9), pages 5689-5714, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eleonora Dagienė, 2024. "Mapping scholarly books: library metadata and research assessment," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(9), pages 5689-5714, September.
    2. Ülle Must, 2012. "Alone or together: examples from history research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 91(2), pages 527-537, May.
    3. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolás Robinson-Garcia & Juan Gorraiz, 2017. "Filling the citation gap: measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(3), pages 1371-1384, December.
    4. Andrea Bonaccorsi & Cinzia Daraio & Stefano Fantoni & Viola Folli & Marco Leonetti & Giancarlo Ruocco, 2017. "Do social sciences and humanities behave like life and hard sciences?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 607-653, July.
    5. Ashraf Maleki, 2022. "OCLC library holdings: assessing availability of academic books in libraries in print and electronic compared to citations and altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 991-1020, February.
    6. Zhang, Chengzhi & Zhou, Qingqing, 2020. "Assessing books’ depth and breadth via multi-level mining on tables of contents," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    7. Yajie Wang & Alesia Zuccala, 2021. "Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4817-4840, June.
    8. Alesia Zuccala & Roberto Cornacchia, 2016. "Data matching, integration, and interoperability for a metric assessment of monographs," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(1), pages 465-484, July.
    9. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Fan Qi & Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio, 2021. "Comparison of academic book impact from a disciplinary perspective: an analysis of citations and altmetric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1101-1123, February.
    10. Ashraf Maleki, 2022. "Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(2), pages 1129-1160, February.
    11. Kousha, Kayvan & Thelwall, Mike, 2018. "Can Microsoft Academic help to assess the citation impact of academic books?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 972-984.
    12. Torres-Salinas, Daniel & Rodríguez-Sánchez, Rosa & Robinson-García, Nicolás & Fdez-Valdivia, J. & García, J.A., 2013. "Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 412-424.
    13. Zhou, Qingqing & Zhang, Chengzhi, 2021. "Impacts towards a comprehensive assessment of the book impact by integrating multiple evaluation sources," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).
    14. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Nicolás Robinson-García & Álvaro Cabezas-Clavijo & Evaristo Jiménez-Contreras, 2014. "Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: edited books, book series and publisher types in the book citation index," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(3), pages 2113-2127, March.
    15. Andrea Mervar & Maja Jokić, 2022. "Core-periphery nexus in the EU social sciences: bibliometric perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(10), pages 5793-5817, October.
    16. Ekaterina L. Dyachenko, 2014. "Internationalization of academic journals: Is there still a gap between social and natural sciences?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 241-255, October.
    17. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    18. Andrea Diem & Stefan C. Wolter, 2011. "The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Performance in Education Sciences," Economics of Education Working Paper Series 0066, University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW), revised May 2013.
    19. Ekaterina Dyachenko, 2013. "Internationalization of academic journals: is there still a gap between social and natural sciences?," HSE Working papers WP BRP 28/HUM/2013, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    20. Yuen-Hsien Tseng & Chun-Yen Chang & M. Shane Tutwiler & Ming-Chao Lin & James P. Barufaldi, 2013. "A scientometric analysis of the effectiveness of Taiwan’s educational research projects," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(3), pages 1141-1166, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:126:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-020-03814-w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.