Data matching, integration, and interoperability for a metric assessment of monographs

Abstract

This paper details a unique data experiment carried out at the University of Amsterdam, Center for Digital Humanities. Data pertaining to monographs were collected from three autonomous resources, the Scopus Journal Index, WorldCat.org and Goodreads, and linked according to unique identifiers in a new Microsoft SQL database. The purpose of the experiment was to investigate co-varied metrics for a list of book titles based on their citation impact (from Scopus), presence in international libraries (WorldCat.org) and visibility as publically reviewed items (Goodreads). The results of our data experiment highlighted current problems related citation indices and the way that books are recorded by different citing authors. Our research further demonstrates the primary problem of matching book titles as 'cited objects' with book titles held in a union library catalog, given that books are always recorded distinctly in libraries if published as separate editions with different International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs). Due to various 'matching' problems related to the ISBN, we suggest a new type of identifier, a 'Book Object Identifier', which would allow bibliometricians to recognize a book published in multiple formats and editions as 'one object' suitable for evaluation. The BOI standard would be most useful for books published in the same language, and would more easily support the integration of data from different types of book indexes.

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

“…Recent studies based on the Book Citation Index, show that citations are too scarce as to be considered as an appropriate impact measure for books (e.g., Torres-Salinas et al, 2014a,b). However, further research is still needed to surpass the many technical issues present when matching metadata from different sources with regards to monographs (Zuccala & Cornacchia, 2016).…”

“…Although no other alternative solution has been proposed so far, this imposes some limitations which should be noted. As indicated by Zuccala and Cornacchia (2016), multiple ISBN numbers may be assigned to the same 'work' due to the publication of new editions, translations or to its reprint and distribution by a different publisher. Table 1 includes the 18 indicators included in this study categorized by PlumX and their source of origin as well as the type of data source.…”

The future of research assessment in the humanities: bottom-up assessment procedures

“…However, Hammarfelt (2016: 115) observes a shift from investigating coverage issues towards studying the characteristics of SSH publication practices and developing bibliometric approaches sensitive to the organization of SSH research fields. This includes, but is not limited to, extending bibliometric analyses to non-source items (Butler and Visser, 2006;Chi, 2014) or the relatively new Book Citation Index (Gorraiz et al, 2013), using other databases like Google Scholar (Kousha and Thelwall, 2009) or data from social media services, the so-called altmetrics (Holmberg and Thelwall, 2014;Mohammadi and Thelwall, 2014;Zuccala et al, 2015;Zuccala and Cornacchia, 2016), analysing the inclusion in library catalogues (White et al, 2009), exploring national databases with full coverage , extending data to references in research grant proposals (Hammarfelt, 2013) or to book reviews (Zuccala and van Leeuwen, 2011;Zuccala et al, 2015), exploring collaboration (Ossenblok and Engels, 2015) and publication patterns (Chi, 2012;Ossenblok et al, 2012;Verleysen and Weeren, 2016). From a more pragmatic point of view, attempts are made to "weigh" the various outputs, such as journals or books in the SSH, similar to the journal impact factor, commonly used in the sciences (Giménez-Toledo, 2016).…”

Grand challenges in data integration—state of the art and future perspectives: an introduction

“…The experiment for the assessment of monographs reported by Zuccala and Cornacchia (2016) highlights that interoperability among different sources could be helpful to address current problems related to citation indices and the way in which books are recorded by Haustein ( (2016) Haustein (2016) different citing authors. They propose a new type of identifier, called a 'Book Object Identifier' (BOI).…”