Mapping Citation Patterns of Book Chapters in the Book Citation Index

TL;DR

This paper visualizes and analyzes citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index, revealing their distribution, similarity measures, and publisher impact across disciplines using innovative mapping techniques.

Contribution

It introduces heliocentric clockwise maps to visualize citation relationships and characterizes citation distributions as Lotkaian, offering new insights into publisher impact and discipline structure.

Findings

Citation patterns follow a Lotkaian distribution.

Heliocentric maps effectively visualize publisher impact.

Citation histograms enable similarity prediction between publishers.

Abstract

In this paper we provide the reader with a visual representation of relationships among the impact of book chapters indexed in the Book Citation Index using information gain values and published by different academic publishers in specific disciplines. The impact of book chapters can be characterized statistically by citations histograms. For instance, we can compute the probability of occurrence of book chapters with a number of citations in different intervals for each academic publisher. We predict the similarity between two citation histograms based on the amount of relative information between such characterizations. We observe that the citation patterns of book chapters follow a Lotkaian distribution. This paper describes the structure of the Book Citation Index using 'heliocentric clockwise maps' which allow the reader not only to determine the grade of similarity of a given academic publisher indexed in the Book Citation Index with a specific discipline according to their citation distribution, but also to easily observe the general structure of a discipline, identifying the publishers with higher impact and output.