Comparing book citations in humanities journals to library holdings : scholarly use versus 'perceived cultural benefit' (RIP)

In this paper we examine the statistical relationship between citation counts to books referenced in SCOPUS humanities journals and library holding counts ('libcitations') retrieved from WorldCat®. Our focus is on books (with ISBN numbers) published between 2001-2006, which received citations in History and Literature & Literary Theory journals during the period of 2007-2011. A Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was used, and our test resulted in significant correlations between the citations and 'libcitations'. We present and discuss the details of our dataset (extracted from a much larger, newly constructed database) and comment on why the 'perceived cultural benefit' of holding a book in a research library can lead to, but may not necessarily lead to use (i.e., a citation) of that book in new humanities research.

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