Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: edited books, book series and publisher types in the book citation index

This paper presents a first approach to analyzing the factors that determine the citation characteristics of books. For this we use the Thomson Reuters’ book citation index, a novel multidisciplinary database launched in 2011 which offers bibliometric data on books. We analyze three possible factors which are considered to affect the citation impact of books: the presence of editors, the inclusion in series and the type of publisher. Also, we focus on highly cited books to see if these factors may affect them as well. We considered as highly cited books, those in the top 5 % of those most highly cited in the database. We define these three aspects and present results for four major scientific areas in order to identify differences by area (science, engineering and technology, social sciences and arts and humanities). Finally, we report differences for edited books and publisher type, however books included in series showed higher impact in two areas.

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