Data matching, integration, and interoperability for a metric assessment of monographs

This paper details a unique data experiment carried out at the University of Amsterdam, Center for Digital Humanities. Data pertaining to monographs were collected from three autonomous resources, the Scopus Journal Index, WorldCat.org and Goodreads, and linked according to unique identifiers in a new Microsoft SQL database. The purpose of the experiment was to investigate co-varied metrics for a list of book titles based on their citation impact (from Scopus), presence in international libraries (WorldCat.org) and visibility as publically reviewed items (Goodreads). The results of our data experiment highlighted current problems related citation indices and the way that books are recorded by different citing authors. Our research further demonstrates the primary problem of matching book titles as ‘cited objects’ with book titles held in a union library catalog, given that books are always recorded distinctly in libraries if published as separate editions with different International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). Due to various ‘matching’ problems related to the ISBN, we suggest a new type of identifier, a ‘Book Object Identifier’, which would allow bibliometricians to recognize a book published in multiple formats and editions as ‘one object’ suitable for evaluation. The BOI standard would be most useful for books published in the same language, and would more easily support the integration of data from different types of book indexes.

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