Rankings of academic publishers
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Recently, there were developments in the field of rankings of academic book publishing, championed among others by The Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS) at the University of New South Wales in Australia.[1]
While bibliometry is usually centered on the concept of citation patterns, more recently so-called Libcitation measurement techniques, championed by the Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS) at the University of New South Wales were designed to estimate the global or also regional presence of authors, universities, research institutes or an entire scientific community on different markets, are gaining ground. [2]
Such a counting of the presence of author’s or even publishing companies’ outputs in global Union catalogues is a new methodology to measure the “real market weight”. In this context, White et al. emphasized that
"Libcitation counts reflect judgments by librarians on the usefulness of publications for their various audiences of readers. The Libcitation measure thus resembles a citation impact measure in discriminating values of publications on a defined ground. It rewards authors whose books (or other publications) are seen by librarians as having relatively wide appeal. A book’s absolute appeal can be determined simply by counting how many libraries hold it, but it can also be gauged in relation to other books in its subject class.” [3]
Libcitations according to The Research Impact Measurement Service (RIMS) at the University of New South Wales reflect what librarians know about the prestige of publishers, the opinions of reviewers, and the reputations of authors. [4]
A book’s Libcitation or a book company's Libcitation count is thus at the basis of some of these new measurement approaches.
Rankings of Publishers by the Dutch Scientific Consortium SENSE
The Dutch Scientific Consortium SENSE was among the first to come up with a ranking of scientic publishers. [5]. SENSE works in conjunction with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and also in accordance with the Standard Evaluation Protocol for Dutch universities. SENSE started to develop performance criteria for its staff in 2006. SENSE distinguishes between A, B, and C journals, and for books between A, B, and C publishers. The latest SENSE ranking, as all previous rankings, is based on the subjective assessment of publisher's standing by prominent Dutch and international scientists. The EXCEL Table is available from the SENSE website. [6]
The development of publisher rankings
Reliable, as such subjective rankings by members of the scientific community may be, performance criteria, based on objective measures are a new trend in the field.
To quantitatively assess the output of an entire publishing company, a research group associated with the University of Granada created a methodology based on the Thomson-Reuters Book Citation Index.[7]
The quantitative weighting of the publishing companies is based on output data, impact (citations) and publisher profile. The twenty leading companies, mentioned by the Granada study, are Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Nova Science Publishers, Edward Elgar, Information Age Publishing, Princeton University Press, and University of California Press.
In a later attempt [8] the Austrian political scientist Arno Tausch used 6 main indicators for 57 companies with complete data from the mentioned earlier studies (SENSE and the Granada study). This attempt not only relied on the Thomson Reuters Book Citation Index, but also employed such measures as the Harvard HOLLIS Catalogue ratio of books that are checked out, per total stock of books available in the Harvard HOLLIS catalog, the maximum outreach of a company on various different book markets (Japan, Sweden and India) as typical scientific global cultures, the presence of works published by the company in International Organizations (the EU Commission Brussels ECLAS catalog, the World Bank, and references about the company in newspapers like the New York Times.
Future rankings
Future rankings might employ the median library outreach of a company in the full version of the OCLC Worldcat.[9]
It should be emphasized[tone] that the new literature on the ranking of book publishers coincides in the judgement[by whom?] that all[citation needed] the major book publishing companies mentioned perform an important[opinion] task in disseminating the results of science on the global markets. The literature by and large encourages also especially younger scientists to risk submitting their works to the leading publishers to assure the presence of their works on the global book markets.[opinion]
References
- ^ see http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00048623.2009.10721387; see also: Tausch, Arno, Die Buchpublikationen der Nobelpreis-Ökonomen und die führenden Buchverlage der Disziplin. Eine bibliometrische Analyse (The Book Publications of the Nobel-Prize Economists and the Leading Book Publishers of the Discipline. A Bibliometric Analysis) (October 15, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2674502
- ^ Howard D. White et al., ‘Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences,’ Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60 (6, 2009): 1083-1096
- ^ Howard D. White et al., ‘Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences,’ Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60 (6, 2009): 1083-1096
- ^ Howard D. White et al., ‘Libcitations: A Measure for Comparative Assessment of Book Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences,’ Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60 (6, 2009): 1083-1096
- ^ http://www.sense.nl/organisation/documentation
- ^ http://www.sense.nl/organisation/documentation
- ^ Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-García, N., Campanario, J.M. & Delgado López-Cózar, E. (2013). Coverage, specialization and impact of scientific publishers in the Book Citation Index. Online Information Review, 38(1) and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267869924_Bibliometric_Indicators_for_Publishers_Data_processing_indicators_and_interpretation
- ^ Tausch, Arno (2017), Die Buchpublikationen der Nobelpreis-Ökonomen und die führenden Buchverlage der Disziplin. Eine bibliometrische Analyse (The book publications of the Nobel-Prize economists and the leading book publishers of the discipline. A bibliometric analysis).‘ Bibliotheksdienst, March 2017: 339 – 374.
- ^ Such an attempt limited to 21 companies in the field of social sciences was published in Tausch, A. (2011). On the Global Impact of Selected Social-Policy Publishers in More Than 100 Countries. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 42(4), 476-513. Further literature on possible new directions in the field includes: Drummond, R., & Wartho, R. (2009). RIMS: the research impact measurement service at the University of New South Wales. Australian Academic & Research Libraries, 40(2), 76-87; Kousha, K., Thelwall, M., & Rezaie, S. (2011). Assessing the citation impact of books: The role of Google Books, Google Scholar, and Scopus. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(11), 2147-2164; Sieber, J., & Gradmann, S. (2011). How to best assess monographs?. Humboldt University Berlin; Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-García, N., & López-Cózar, E. D. (2012). Towards a Book Publishers Citation Reports. First approach using the Book Citation Index. arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.7067; Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-García, N., Cabezas-Clavijo, Á., & Jiménez-Contreras, E. (2014). Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: edited books, book series and publisher types in the book citation index. Scientometrics, 98(3), 2113-2127; Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-Garcia, N., Miguel Campanario, J., & Delgado López-Cózar, E. (2014). Coverage, field specialisation and the impact of scientific publishers indexed in the Book Citation Index. Online Information Review, 38(1), 24-42; Torres-Salinas, D., Rodríguez-Sánchez, R., Robinson-García, N., Fdez-Valdivia, J., & García, J. A. (2013). Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index. Journal of Informetrics, 7(2), 412-424; Waltman, L., & Schreiber, M. (2013). On the calculation of percentile‐based bibliometric indicators. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(2), 372-379; White, H. D.; Boell, Sebastian K.; Yu, H.; Davis, M.; Wilson, C. S.; Cole, Fletcher T.H. J. (2009) Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. Jun2009, Vol. 60 Issue 6, p1083-1096; Zuccala, A. A., & White, H. D. (2015). Correlating Libcitations and Citations in the Humanities with WorldCat and Scopus Data. In A. A. Salah, Y. Tonta, A. A. Akdag Salah, C. Sugimoto, & U. Al (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), Istanbul, Turkey, 29th June to 4th July, 2015. (pp. 305-316). Bogazici University; Zuccala, A., & Guns, R. (2013). Comparing book citations in humanities journals to library holdings: Scholarly use versus perceived cultural benefit. In 14th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (pp. 353-360); Zuccala, A., Guns, R., Cornacchia, R., & Bod, R. (2014). Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
