Can Microsoft Academic help to assess the citation impact of academic books?

TL;DR

This study evaluates whether Microsoft Academic can reliably measure the citation impact of academic books, comparing it with Book Citation Index and Google Books across multiple fields and years.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of citation counts from Microsoft Academic, BKCI, and Google Books for academic books, highlighting Microsoft Academic's coverage and limitations.

Findings

Microsoft Academic covers about 60% of BKCI books.

Microsoft Academic's citation counts are 1.5 to 3.6 times higher than BKCI for many fields.

Microsoft Academic generally finds more citations than Google Books in several fields.

Abstract

Despite recent evidence that Microsoft Academic is an extensive source of citation counts for journal articles, it is not known if the same is true for academic books. This paper fills this gap by comparing citations to 16,463 books from 2013-2016 in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) against automatically extracted citations from Microsoft Academic and Google Books in 17 fields. About 60% of the BKCI books had records in Microsoft Academic, varying by year and field. Citation counts from Microsoft Academic were 1.5 to 3.6 times higher than from BKCI in nine subject areas across all years for books indexed by both. Microsoft Academic found more citations than BKCI because it indexes more scholarly publications and combines citations to different editions and chapters. In contrast, BKCI only found more citations than Microsoft Academic for books in three fields from 2013-2014. Microsoft Academic also found more citations than Google Books in six fields for all years. Thus, Microsoft Academic may be a useful source for the impact assessment of books when comprehensive coverage is not essential.