The insoluble problems of books: What does Altmetric.com have to offer?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Altmetric.com as a data source for bibliometric analysis of books, highlighting its capabilities, limitations, and comparison with PlumX, revealing that both tools are complementary rather than interchangeable.

Contribution

It provides an exploratory analysis of Altmetric.com's functionalities for books and compares its effectiveness with PlumX, identifying key issues and complementarities.

Findings

Altmetric.com primarily uses DOI and Google Books data sources.

Issues with record linkage and ISBN discrepancies were identified.

Altmetric.com and PlumX offer complementary insights, not interchangeable data.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the capabilities, functionalities and appropriateness of Altmetric.com as a data source for the bibliometric analysis of books in comparison to PlumX. We perform an exploratory analysis on the metrics the Altmetric Explorer for Institutions platform offers for books. We use two distinct datasets of books: the Book Collection included in Altmetric.com and the Clarivate's Master Book List, to analyze Altmetric.com's capabilities to download and merge data with external databases. Finally, we compare our findings with those obtained in a previous study performed in PlumX. Altmetric.com combines and orderly tracks a set of data sources combined by DOI identifiers to retrieve metadata from books, being Google Books its main provider. It also retrieves information from commercial publishers and from some Open Access initiatives, including those led by university libraries such as Harvard Library. We find issues with linkages between records and mentions or ISBN discrepancies. Furthermore, we find that automatic bots affect greatly Wikipedia mentions to books. Our comparison with PlumX suggests that none of these tools provide a complete picture of the social attention generated by books and are rather complementary than comparable tools.