Book-impact metric for research assessment in book-based disciplines: Self-archiving books' metadata and bibliographies

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SUMMARY: In addition to despositing in their institutional repositories the metadata plus the full-texts of their journal articles, researchers should also deposit the metadata plus the cited-reference lists of their books. This will allow the book citations to be harvested webwide and citation-linked, exactly as article citations will be, thereby providing book citation-impact metrics for book-based disciplines, alongside the usual journal-article citation-impact metrics.

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For all disciplines -- but especially for disciplines that are more book-based than journal-article-based -- it would be highly beneficial for authors to self-archive in their institutional repositories the metadata as well as the cited-reference lists (bibliographies) for the books they publish annually. That way, next-generation scientometric search engines like citebase will be able to harvest and link their reference lists (exactly as they do the reference lists of articles whose full texts have been self-archived). This will generate a book citation impact metric.

Books cite and are cited by books; moreover, books cite articles and are cited by articles. It is already possible to scrape together a rudimentary book-impact index from Thompson-ISI's Web of Knowledge along with data from Google Books and Google Scholar, but a worldwide Open Access database, across all disciplines, indexing all the article output as well as the book output self-archived in all the world's institutional repositories could do infinitely better than that:

All that's needed is for authors' institutions and funders to mandate institutional (author) self-archiving of (1) the metadata and full-texts of all their article output along with (2) the metadata and reference lists of all their book output.

We can even do better than that, because although many book authors may not wish to make their books' full-texts Open Access (OA), they can still deposit their books' full-texts in their institutional repositories and set access as Closed Access -- accessible only to scientometric full-text harvesters and indexers (like google books) for full-text inversion, boolean search, and semiometric analysis (text endogamy/exogamy, text-overlap, text similarity/proximity, semantic lineage, latent semantic analysis, etc.) -- without making the full-text text itself OA to individual users (i.e., potential book-buyers) if they do not wish to.

This will help provide the UK's new metrics-based Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) with research performance indicators better suited for the disciplines whose research is not as journal-article- (and conference-paper-) based as that of the physical, biological and engineering sciences.

Carr, L, Hitchcock, S., Oppenheim, C., McDonald, J.W., Champion, T. & Harnad, S. (2006) Can journal-based research impact assessment be generalised to book-based disciplines? (Research Proposal)

SUMMARY: The "impact" of academic research is typically measured by how much it is read, used and cited, and by how much new work it generates and influences. Services that measure impact work well for journal-based disciplines. Book-based disciplines can now benefit from online tools and methods of impact analysis too.These analyses also predict fruitful directions for future research, and so can inform research assessment and funding. The present research project will extend tools for online bibliometric data collection of publications and their citations with the aim of testing and evaluating new Web metrics to assist research assessment in book-based disciplines.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum