Citation Analysis

Finding Citation Counts for Books and Book Chapters

A number of disciplines, especially in the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities publish their research in books and other types of publications. These disciplines are not that well served by traditional tools of citation analysis such as Web of Science and Scopus that primarily focus on journal literature. So how do you gauge the scholarly impact of your books and chapters in books? Listed below are a few strategies, while they are not perfect or comprehensive, they can help you collect some relevant data:

• WorldCat: The WorldCat is a catalog that reflects the holdings of libraries around the world. It contains records for the following types of materials: books, journals, musical scores, computer data files, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, manuscripts, sound recordings, films and slides, maps, and videotapes. To assess the scholarly impact of your books, search each title in WorldCat and in each relevant record, check the “Libraries Worldwide” field. It will tell you how many Libraries own that item and also provide the names of the Libraries.


• Google Scholar: As mentioned elsewhere in this guide, Google Scholar’s strength lies in the fact that it not only indexes journal articles but also books, book chapters and other non-traditional sources such as promotional pages, table of contents pages, course reading lists etc. Caveats: Google Scholar is not as sophisticated as Scopus or Web of Science. It cannot remove self-citations and so you have to look for them yourself which can be time-consuming. It sometimes has multiple entries for one work which can inflate results.

Also, some discipline-specific databases such as PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts that also index books and book chapters will provide “times cited” information for books and chapters cited by other items indexed within those databases.

Finding Citation Counts for Books and Book Chapters

A number of disciplines, especially in the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities publish their research in books and other types of publications. These disciplines are not that well served by traditional tools of citation analysis such as Web of Science and Scopus that primarily focus on journal literature. So how do you gauge the scholarly impact of your books and chapters in books? Listed below are a few strategies, while they are not perfect or comprehensive, they can help you collect some relevant data:  

• WorldCat: The WorldCat is a catalog that reflects the holdings of libraries around the world. It contains records for the following types of materials: books, journals, musical scores, computer data files, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, manuscripts, sound recordings, films and slides, maps, and videotapes. To assess the scholarly impact of your books, search each title in WorldCat and in each relevant record, check the “Libraries Worldwide” field. It will tell you how many Libraries own that item and also provide the names of the Libraries.


• Google Scholar: As mentioned elsewhere in this guide, Google Scholar’s strength lies in the fact that it not only indexes journal articles but also books, book chapters and other non-traditional sources such as promotional pages, table of contents pages, course reading lists etc. Caveats: Google Scholar is not as sophisticated as Scopus or Web of Science. It cannot remove self-citations and so you have to look for them yourself which can be time-consuming. It sometimes has multiple entries for one work which can inflate results.

Also, some discipline-specific databases such as PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts that also index books and book chapters will provide “times cited” information for books and chapters cited by other items indexed within those databases.