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

Abstract

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.

Local impact of books: A comparison of libcitations from research‐oriented and public libraries

“…Furthermore, our data does not provide sufficient coverage of electronic holdings. Previous literature has shown that there is a difference between electronic and print holdings (Maleki, 2021).…”

“…Not only academic books but also books written for general audiences and books written for professional audiences are an important part of SSH output. Library holdings are associated with various aspects of impact, not only academic impact (citations) but also educational impact (syllabus mentions), cultural impact (White & Zuccala, 2018) or uptake among the general public (Halevi et al, 2016), e.g., in Goodreads (Maleki, 2021). Sivertsen (2022) argues that the SSH interact directly with society through both professional communications (depending on the discipline, these can be commissioned reports, legal commentaries, and textbooks) and public media (including sources of public information and literature aimed at a non-scholarly audience).…”

“…Another important note has to be made on e-books. While electronic holdings are increasingly important, they are hard to combine with print holdings as electronic holding patterns are different (Maleki, 2021). A continued increase of both electronic holdings and the use of electronic books impacts the way books are borrowed and used and the differences in terms of acquisition of print and electronic books may impact libcitation scores.…”

“…The large public libraries also appear closer together suggesting that they have more similar collections of SSH-authored books. Maleki (2021Maleki ( , 2022 pointed to the importance of electronic holdings in library holding analysis and found in particular that library print holdings reflect educational and research impact better than electronic holdings. For the research-oriented libraries, the holding format is listed as either electronic, print or mixed media.…”

Image Retrieval Technology of Smart Archives from the Perspective of National Reading

“…However, with the acceleration of the pace of social life and the increase of life pressure, people are more and more inclined to shallow reading, utilitarian reading, entertain-ment reading, fragmented reading, and other reading methods. The traditional reading form based on reading books is undergoing severe challenges [16]. The above shows the importance and value of carrying out national reading promotion activities.…”