Juan Gorraiz

Opportunities for and limitations of the Book Citation Index

This article offers important background information about a new product, the Book Citation Index (BKCI), launched in 2011 by Thomson Reuters. Information is illustrated by some new facts concerning The BKCIs use in bibliometrics, coverage analysis, and a series of idiosyncrasies worthy of further discussion. The BKCI was launched primarily to assist researchers identify useful and relevant research that was previously invisible to them, owing to the lack of significant book content in citation indexes such as the Web of Science. So far, the content of 33,000 books has been added to the desktops of the global research community, the majority in the arts, humanities, and social sciences fields. Initial analyses of the data from The BKCI have indicated that The BKCI, in its current version, should not be used for bibliometric or evaluative purposes. The most significant limitations to this potential application are the high share of publications without address information, the inflation of publication counts, the lack of cumulative citation counts from different hierarchical levels, and inconsistency in citation counts between the cited reference search and the book citation index. However, The BKCI is a first step toward creating a reliable and necessary citation data source for monographs — a very challenging issue, because, unlike journals and conference proceedings, books have specific requirements, and several problems emerge not only in the context of subject classification, but also in their role as cited publications and in citing publications.

A bibliometric analysis of pharmacology and pharmacy journals: Scopus versus Web of Science

Our study examines the suitability of Scopus for bibliometric analyses in comparison with the Web of Science (WOS). In particular we want to explore if the outcome of bibliometric analyses differs between Scopus and WOS and, if yes, in which aspects. Since journal indicators vary among disciplines, we analysed only journals from the subject pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Nonetheless, our study has also broader implications. Its major findings are: (a) Each top-100 JCR pharmacy journal was covered by Scopus. (b) The impact factor was higher for 82 and the immediacy index greater for 78 journals in Scopus in 2005. Pharmacy journals with a high impact factor in the JCR usually have a high impact factor in Scopus. (c) Several medium impact journals could be identified in Scopus which were not reported in JCR. (d) The two databases differed in the number of articles within a tolerable margin of deviation for most journals.

Global usage versus global citation metrics: The case of pharmacology journals

Following the transition from print journals to electronic (hybrid) journals in the past decade, usage metrics have become an interesting complement to citation metrics. In this article we investigate the similarities of and differences between usage and citation indicators for pharmacy and pharmacology journals and relate the results to a previous study on oncology journals. For the comparison at journal level we use the classical citation indicators as defined in the Journal Citation Reports and compute the corresponding usage indicators. At the article level we not only relate download and citation counts to each other but also try to identify the possible effect of citations upon subsequent downloads. Usage data were provided by ScienceDirect both at the journal level and, for a few selected journals, on a paper‐by‐paper basis. The corresponding citation data were retrieved from the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports. Our analyses show that electronic journals have become generally accepted over the last decade. While the supply of ScienceDirect pharma journals rose by 50% between 2001 and 2006, the total number of article downloads (full‐text articles [FTAs]) multiplied more than 5‐fold in the same period. This also impacted the pattern of scholarly communication (strong increase in the immediacy index) in the past few years. Our results further reveal a close relation between citation and download frequencies. We computed a high correlation at the journal level when using absolute values and a moderate to high correlation when relating usage and citation impact factors. At the article level the rank correlation between downloads and citations was only medium‐sized. Differences between downloads and citations exist in terms of obsolescence characteristics. While more than half of the articles are downloaded in the publication year or 1 year later, the median cited half‐life was nearly 6 years for our journal sample. Our attempt to reveal a direct influence of citations upon downloads proved not to be feasible.

Bibliometric practices and activities at the University of Vienna

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe bibliometrics as an emergent field for academic libraries. There is a constant need to adapt to the ongoing changes and new demands of todays information environment, and the increasing importance of bibliometrics certainly presents a great opportunity for librarians to broaden their horizon.Design/methodology/approach – The ideas outlined here are based on supporting information derived from literature and on practical experience gained at the Vienna University Library, Austria. A rationale is given why libraries should provide bibliometric services followed by a short overview of how the Bibliometrics Department in Vienna came into being. The focus of the paper is set on a detailed description of its practices and activities.Findings – Bibliometrics is ideal for librarians to develop and provide innovative services for both academic and administrative university staff. In doing so they make sure to actively participate in the development of new strateg...

Usage metrics versus altmetrics: confusing terminology?

Recently an increasingly controversial discussion about the concepts of usage metrics and altmetrics got going at conferences and meetings in our field. While for a small group both concepts are clearly different, a large part of the community tends to regard usage metrics as a subset of altmetrics. From our point of view this use of terminology is not appropriate, and can easily lead to unnecessary confusion and misunderstandings reflected in a distorted scientific communication. In what follows we will argue why a distinction should be made between the two terms ‘usage metrics’ and ‘altmetrics’. The main reason is of historical nature. Usage metrics have already been around much longer than altmetrics. In fact, usage metrics are even older than citation metrics, because librarians have been tracking usage since the beginning of their profession, ranging from basic user surveys to the usage tracking of physical journal issues and monographs to library loan statistics to the sophisticated analysis of e-media usage (e-metrics). There is an abundance of statistics and models on library-related usage data, based on different sampling techniques, cumbersome procedures or comprehensive methods of gathering usage data for all subscribed publication types (Coombs 2005; Kraemer 2006; Franklin et al. 2009).

Key factors and considerations in the assessment of international collaboration: a case study for Austria and six countries

This bibliometric study on the collaboration of Austria and six target countries (Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland and Israel) reveals the importance of differentiation between the bilateral and multilateral contingents in the assessment of international scientific collaboration. For this purpose a “degree of bilaterality” (DB) and a “citation degree of bilaterality” (CDB) are introduced. In our findings the DB and the CDB have values lower than 1/3 and 1/5, respectively. Therefore, the total collaboration is mostly shaped in its volume and impact by the multilateral contingent. Regarding the impact estimation of the collaboration publication output, a multi-faceted approach was used. It is recommended to separately analyze the following three aspects: the un-cited range, the average range and the excellence range. Considering different country specific parameters the total number of publications and citations were resized for each type of collaboration and the results discussed. Only a very weak correlation between ‘times cited’ and the number of affiliations or authors was observed at publication level. Neither the number of authors or affiliations determines impact increase. Rather internationalisation and cooperation seem to be the crucial factors.

On the impact of Gold Open Access journals

Gold Open Access (=Open Access publishing) is for many the preferred route to achieve unrestricted and immediate access to research output. However, true Gold Open Access journals are still outnumbered by traditional journals. Moreover availability of Gold OA journals differs from discipline to discipline and often leaves scientists concerned about the impact of these existent titles. This study identified the current set of Gold Open Access journals featuring a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) by means of Ulrichsweb, Directory of Open Access Journals and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The results were analyzed regarding disciplines, countries, quartiles of the JIF distribution in JCR and publishers. Furthermore the temporal impact evolution was studied for a Top 50 titles list (according to JIF) by means of Journal Impact Factor, SJR and SNIP in the time interval 2000–2010. The identified top Gold Open Access journals proved to be well-established and their impact is generally increasing for all the analyzed indicators. The majority of JCR-indexed OA journals can be assigned to Life Sciences and Medicine. The success-rate for JCR inclusion differs from country to country and is often inversely proportional to the number of national OA journal titles. Compiling a list of JCR-indexed OA journals is a cumbersome task that can only be achieved with non-Thomson Reuters data sources. A corresponding automated feature to produce current lists “on the fly” would be desirable in JCR in order to conveniently track the impact evolution of Gold OA journals.

The ecstasy and the agony of the altmetric score

Altmetrics have gained momentum and are meant to overcome the shortcomings of citation-based metrics. In this regard some light is shed on the dangers associated with the new “all-in-one” indicator altmetric score.

The power of book reviews: a simple and transparent enhancement approach for book citation indexes

Both citations to an academic work and post-publication reviews of it are indicators that the work has had some impact on the research community. The Thomson Reuters evaluation and selection process for web of knowledge journals includes citation analysis but this is not systematically practised for evaluation of books for the book citation index (BKCI) due to the inconsistent methods of citing books, the volume of books and the variants of the titles, especially in non-English language. Despite the fact that correlations between citations to a book and the number of corresponding book reviews differ from research area to research area and are overall weak or non-existent, this study confirms that books with book reviews do not remain uncited and accrue a remarkable mean number of citations. Therefore, book reviews can be considered a suitable selection criterion for BKCIs. The approach suggested in this study is feasible and allows easy detection of corresponding books via its book reviews, which is particularly true for research areas where books play a more important role such as the social sciences, the arts and humanities.

Document delivery as a source for bibliometric analyses: the case of Subito

This paper deals with a bibliometric analysis of data from the document delivery service Subito. After a short introduction, Subito will be presented briefly. The main part reports on the design and the results of the study, which covers the following major topics • distribution of article orders to journals, • identification of the core journals which contribute to most article supplies, • subject distribution of the most requested journals, • relation between the most requested (Subito) and the most cited journals (SCI), • differences in age of ordered and cited articles, and • dependency of journal requests on their subscription rates. As will be shown, most Subito article orders are covered by a relatively small number of journals, most of which are from life sciences, especially medicine. There is only a slight overlap between the most requested and the most cited journals suggesting that these two indicators represent different concepts. This is also confirmed by different obsolescence characteristics. The share of current publications is much higher among ordered than among cited articles. Finally, there was no evidence that articles of journals with higher subscription rates are ordered more often.