Towards a Book Publishers Citation Reports. First approach using the Book Citation Index

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first attempt to create citation reports for book publishers using the new Book Citation Index, enabling bibliometric analysis of books and chapters in social sciences and humanities.

Contribution

It presents the development of the 'Book Publishers Citation Reports' based on impact indicators from the Book Citation Index for social sciences and humanities publishers from 2006-2011.

Findings

19 rankings across disciplines in Humanities & Arts and Social Sciences & Law

Six impact indicators used for publisher evaluation

First bibliometric analysis of book publishers in these fields

Abstract

The absence of books and book chapters in the Web of Science Citation Indexes (SCI, SSCI and A&HCI) has always been considered an important flaw but the Thomson Reuters 'Book Citation Index' database was finally available in October of 2010 indexing 29,618 books and 379,082 book chapters. The Book Citation Index opens a new window of opportunities for analyzing these fields from a bibliometric point of view. The main objective of this article is to analyze different impact indicators referred to the scientific publishers included in the Book Citation Index for the Social Sciences and Humanities fields during 2006-2011. This way we construct what we have called the 'Book Publishers Citation Reports'. For this, we present a total of 19 rankings according to the different disciplines in Humanities & Arts and Social Sciences & Law with six indicators for scientific publishers