Citation Characteristics and Intellectual Acceptance of Scholarly Monographs

Abstract

The present study investigates citations to 750 randomly selected scholarly monographs in disciplines of religion, history, psychology, economics, mathematics, and physics. The objective of the study is to understand distributions of citations to scholarly monographs in various disciplines, to explore disciplinary difference in the citing of books, and to compare citations to monographs with previous results on citations to journal articles. The data revealed interesting citation patterns and aging effects that are in several aspects different from citation data based on the journal literature. While the distribution trend of monographic uncitedness is similar to that of journals across the disciplines, the noncitation ratios are much lower than what has been reported about journal citations. Half-life measures of scientific monographs are greater than those in the humanities and social sciences; this contradicts previous findings. Citation frequency and Price's Index vary from discipline to discipline, and the most significant linear contract occurred between disciplines of religion, history, and economics as one group and psychology, mathematics, and physics as another. When using periods of intellectual acceptance as the unit of analysis, significant disciplinary differences emerged both in terms of citation frequency and the number of books cited. Significant differences also appeared between earlier periods of intellectual acceptance that are within the first 10 years following the original publication year and longer ages of survival that are beyond 10 years.

Revisiting an open access monograph experiment: measuring citations and tweets 5 years later

“…Tang (2008) analyses citations of 750 randomly selected monographs in the humanities and the sciences. Within each discipline, he finds differences in the number of uncited books, the time span in which half of the citations are occurring, and the recency of citations.…”

Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index

“…Book chapters have been scarcely studied in the field of scientometrics, least with such a large data set as the one provided by the BKCI. Therefore it is interesting to analyze their citation behavior and characteristics as, although some studies have deepen on the citation patterns of books (Tang, 2008), none focus on book chapters. We take a novel approach using academic publishers as unit of analysis in order to perform a secondary analysis on the structure of the BKCI.…”

Science and its significant other: Representing the humanities in bibliometric scholarship

“…Cullars () analyzed references in monographs within American and British literary research and contextualizes these in comparison with other humanities disciplines, comparing his results with, among others, Heinzkill () and Stern (). Other studies of a similar design include Budd (), Cullars (, , 1998), Thompson (), and Tang (). More recently, a similar approach has been used by Ardanuy, Urbano, and Quintana () to study Catalan literary studies, and by Hammarfelt () to analyze references in Swedish literary studies.…”