Correlating Libcitations and Citations in the Humanities with WorldCat and Scopus Data

TY - GEN

T1 - Correlating Libcitations and Citations in the Humanities with WorldCat and Scopus Data

AU - Zuccala, Alesia Ann

AU - White, Howard D.

N1 - Conference code: 15

PY - 2015

Y1 - 2015

N2 - The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book's cultural impact. Torres-Salinas and Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmetric for authors of books in, e.g., the humanities, since the major citation indexes, oriented toward scientific papers, have not served them well. Here, using very large samples, we explore the libcitation-citation relationship for the same books by correlating their holdings counts from OCLC's WorldCat with their citation counts from Elsevier's Scopus. For books cited in two broad fields of the humanities during 1996-2000 and 2007-2011, we obtain positive, weak, but highly significant correlations. These largely persist when books are divided by main Dewey class. The overall results are inconclusive, however, because the Scopus citation counts for the books tend to be very low. Further correlational research should probably use the much higher book citation counts from Google Scholar. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis of widely held and widely cited books clarifies the libcitation measure and helps to justify it.

AB - The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book's cultural impact. Torres-Salinas and Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmetric for authors of books in, e.g., the humanities, since the major citation indexes, oriented toward scientific papers, have not served them well. Here, using very large samples, we explore the libcitation-citation relationship for the same books by correlating their holdings counts from OCLC's WorldCat with their citation counts from Elsevier's Scopus. For books cited in two broad fields of the humanities during 1996-2000 and 2007-2011, we obtain positive, weak, but highly significant correlations. These largely persist when books are divided by main Dewey class. The overall results are inconclusive, however, because the Scopus citation counts for the books tend to be very low. Further correlational research should probably use the much higher book citation counts from Google Scholar. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis of widely held and widely cited books clarifies the libcitation measure and helps to justify it.

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-975-518-381-7

SP - 305

EP - 316

BT - Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), Istanbul, Turkey, 29th June to 4th July, 2015

A2 - Salah, Albert Ali

A2 - Tonta, Yasar

A2 - Akdag Salah, Alkim Almila

A2 - Sugimoto, Cassidy

A2 - Al, Umut

CY - Bogazici University

T2 - Proceedings of ISSI 2015 Istanbul: 15th International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference,

Y2 - 29 June 2015 through 3 July 2015

ER -