An Assessment of Publisher Quality by Political Science Librarians

Abstract

Publisher quality is one criterion used by collection development librarians in making book selection decisions. Few studies have assessed the perceptions subject specialist librarians have about the quality of academic publishers’ output in specific disciplines. The author surveyed a sample of members of the Association of College and Research Libraries Law & Political Science Section, asking them to assess the overall quality of political science books published by sixty-two academic presses and imprints. The results are reported, analyzed, and compared to a similar survey of members of the American Political Science Association. Many similarities are seen in the rankings, although, on the whole, librarians ranked university presses higher and commercial publishers lower than did political scientists.

Libcitations: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences

“…But it is hardly in dispute that authors want to publish with the best presses they can. We therefore see quality rankings as a justifiable means of testing libcitation validity, and we would expect rankings of academic publishers (as in Lewis 2000) to covary significantly with libcitation counts of books.…”

“…Libcitations should also correlate with quality rankings of the presses that publish academic books (Metz & Stemmer 1996;Goodson et al 1999;Lewis 2000;Wiberley 2002Wiberley , 2004. Similar quality rankings of academic journals (East 2006;Mingers & Harzing 2007;Haddow 2008) have proved controversial (see, e.g., Corbyn 2008a.…”

Evaluating Scholarly Book Publishers—A Case Study in the Field of Journalism

“…Attempts have been made to determine the quality of publishers in certain disciplines, particularly political science (Garand & Giles, 2011;Goodson, Dillman & Hira, 1999;Lewis, 2000), economics (Laband, 1990;Torres-Salinas & Moed, 2009), and criminology (Gabbidon, Higgins & Martin, 2010). These studies have employed various methods including surveys and the creation of new metrics.…”

“…The authors found that the rankings were quite consistent regardless of institution type or collection development experience. Lewis (2000) applied a method originally used in a survey of political scientists (Goodson, Dillman, & Hira, 1999) to examine the preferences of librarians who specialize in the development and management of political science collections. These two studies provide an opportunity to compare the opinions of practicing academicians toward subject-specialist librarians.…”

Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history

“…Publisher "quality" has previously been assessed using survey studies (Garand & Giles, 2011;Goodson, Dillman, & Hira, 1999;Lewis, 2000;Metz & Stemmer, 1996) and has also been related to library catalogue holdings (Donovan & Butler, 2007; SENSE-Research School for Socio-Economic and Natural Sciences of the Environment, 2009) and number of reviews per publisher and publisher reputation (Jordy, McGrath, & Rutledge, 1999). The concept of prestige, which is slightly different from "quality," is often associated with academic publishing advice, specifically the the selection of a university press by a scholar who has written a new book (Pasco, 2002;Pratt, 1993;Rowson, 1995).…”