Library Catalog Analysis and Library Holdings Counts: Origins, Methodological Issues and Application to the Field of Informetrics

Torres‐Salinas, Daniel; Arroyo-Machado, Wenceslao

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-47665-6_13

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Library Holding (LH) refers to the number of libraries that have acquired a certain book title in their collection. A recent study into the WorldCat (a significant source of library holding statistics) has indicated that U.S. libraries (about 63%) are predominant among an overall 15,195 libraries worldwide, of which 38% (5804) account for academic libraries, 29% (4441) public libraries and 33% (4950) other libraries (Torres-Salinas & Arroyo-Machado, 2020 ). This suggests that there can be stronger academic theme in WorldCat’s library holding counts for scholarly books.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

Maleki

2021

Scientometrics

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Scholarly books are important outputs in some fields and their many publishing formats seem to introduce opportunities to scrutinize their impact. As there is a growing interest in the publisher-enforced massive collection of ebooks in libraries in the past decade, this study examined how this influences the relationship that library print holdings (LPH), library electronic holdings (LEH) and total library holdings (TLH) have with other metrics. As a follow up study to a previous research on OCLC library holdings, the relationship between library holdings and twelve other metrics including Scopus Citations, Google Books (GB) Citations, Goodreads engagements, and Altmetric indicators were examined for 119,794 Scopus-indexed book titles across 26 fields. Present study confirms the weak correlation levels observed between TLH and other indicators in previous studies and contributes additional evidence that print holdings can moderately reflect research, educational and online impact of books consistently more efficient than eholdings and total holdings across fields and over time, except for Mendeley for which eholdings slightly prevailed. Regression models indicated that along with other dimensions, Google Books Citations frequently best explained LPH (in 14 out of 26 fields), whereas Goodreads User counts were weak, but the best predictor of both LEH and TLH (in 15 fields out of 26), suggesting significant association of eholdings with online uptake of books. Overall, findings suggest that inclusion of eholdings overrides the more impactful counts of print holdings in Total Library Holdings metric and therefore undermines the statistical results, whilst print holdings has both statistically and theoretically promising underlying assumptions for prediction of impact of books and shows greater promise than the general Library Holding metric for book impact assessment. Thus, there is a need for a distinction between print and electronic holding counts to be made, otherwise total library holding data need to be interpreted with caution.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relationship between library holdings and many other indicators is already tested in different studies and reviewed in Torres-Salinas and Arroyo-Machado ( 2020 ). Previous studies have used it to indicate whether library holding counts can indicate other aspects of impact.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

Maleki

2021

Scientometrics

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Tracing the Art of Metrics-Based Research Assessment Through Henk Moed’s Work

Daraio

Glänzel

2020

Evaluative Informetrics: The Art of Metrics-Based Research Assessment

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Exploring WorldCat identities as an altmetric information source: a library catalog analysis experiment in the field of Scientometrics

2021

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Assessing the impact of scholarly books is a difficult research evaluation problem. Library Catalog Analysis facilitates the quantitative study, at different levels, of the impact and diffusion of academic books based on data about their availability in libraries. The WorldCat global catalog collates data on library holdings, offering a range of tools including the novel WorldCat Identities. This is based on author profiles and provides indicators relating to the availability of their books in library catalogs. Here, we investigate this new tool to identify its strengths and weaknesses based on a sample of Bibliometrics and Scientometrics authors. We review the problems that this entails and compare Library Catalog Analysis indicators with Google Scholar and Web of Science citations. The results show that WorldCat Identities can be a useful tool for book impact assessment but the value of its data is undermined by the provision of massive collections of ebooks to academic libraries.

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Library Catalog Analysis and Library Holdings Counts: Origins, Methodological Issues and Application to the Field of Informetrics

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

Tracing the Art of Metrics-Based Research Assessment Through Henk Moed’s Work

Exploring WorldCat identities as an altmetric information source: a library catalog analysis experiment in the field of Scientometrics

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