Filling the citation gap: Measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX

TL;DR

This study evaluates the multidimensional impact of academic books using PlumX, highlighting the limited presence of altmetrics and the prominence of library holdings as a key impact indicator.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of 18 impact indicators for books and compares their effectiveness with traditional citation metrics.

Findings

Altmetrics are rarely present in monograph impact assessment.

Library holdings are the most prominent indicator for book impact.

Altmetrics are less prevalent for books than for journal articles.

Abstract

More than five years after their emergence, altmetrics are still seen as a promise to complement traditional citation-based indicators. However, no study has focused on their potential usefulness to capture the impact of scholarly books. While recent literature shows that citation indicators cannot fully capture the impact of books, other studies have suggested alternative indicators such as usage, publishers' prestige or library holdings. In this paper, we calculate 18 indicators which range from altmetrics to library holdings, views, downloads or citations to the production of monographs of a Spanish university using the bibliometric suite PlumX from EBSCO. The objective of the study is to adopt a multidimensional perspective on the analysis of books and understand the level of complementarity between these different indicators. Also, we compare the overview offered by this range of indicators when applied to monographs with the traditional bibliometric perspective focused on journal articles and citation impact. We observe a low presence of altmetric indicators for monographs, even lower than for journal articles and a predominance of library holdings, confirming this indicator as the most promising one towards the analysis of the impact of books.