How to read guide

The Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index (BKCI) was launched in 2011. It provides large sets of citation and publication data on monographs and book chapters and it is included in the Web of Science Core Collection within the Web of Knowledge platform. It covers scientific literature since 1999 and, as it occurs with the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, it follows a rigorous selection process using the following principle criteria (Testa, 2010): 1) currency of publications, 2)complete bibliographic information for all cited references, and 3) the implementation of a peer review process. As a recent product, the BKCI has important limitations that must be considered when analyzing the results shown. Here we summarize the main ones (Torres-Salinas et al., 2014):

• Language bias. It is strongly biased towards English language speaking countries, as to date (November, 2014), 97.7% of the records are in this language.
• Great concentration of publishers. Only three publishers (Springer, Palgrave and Routledge) represent half of the database.
• Dispersion of citations. Due to the distinction between books and book chapters, citations to each of them are also considered as independent.

References

Testa, J. (2010).The book selection process for the Book Citation Index in Web of Science. Available at http://wokinfo.com/media/pdf/BKCI-SelectionEssay_web.pdf

Torres-Salinas, D.; Robinson-Garcia, N.; Cabezas-Clavijo, Á.; Jiménez-Contreras, E. (2014). Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: edited books, book series and publisher types in the Book Citation Index. Scientometrics,98(3), 2113-2127.doi:10.1007/s11192-013-1168-4.

For each publisher we display six indicators showing three different aspects of each publisher’s performance:

Output indicators

• PBK. Total number of books published by a given publisher in a certain field or discipline in the last five years. Minimum threshold: 5.
• PCH. Total number of book chapters published by a given publisher in a certain field or discipline in the last five years. Minimum threshold: 50.

Impact indicators

• CIT. Total number of citations received by a given publisher in a certain field or discipline at the time of the data retrieval process.
• FNCS. Field Normalized Citation Score. Normalized citations received according to the normalized indicator as defined by Moed et al. (1995).

Publisher’s profile

• AI. Activity Index. Distribution of books in a given field or discipline according to the overall output of a given publisher and in reference to the distribution of the whole Book Citation Index. If the value equals one then, the share of books as of the publisher is the same as the world average. Higher than one means more specialization in the given field.
• ED. Share of book chapters which belong to edited books from the total number of book chapters published by a given publisher in a certain field or discipline in the last five years.

The output displayed belongs to the 2009-2013 time period. A publication window of five years was chosen in order to provide stable results. However, some publishers have very few records for certain fields and disciplines. Some of the indicators shown have strong limitations when working with small sets of data, such as the FNCS or the AI. In order to avoid this limitations, a minimum output threshold was determined in order to include a publisher in a given field or discipline. Only publishers which meet the following criteria are included: 1) a minimum of five books or 2) a minimum of 50 book chapters.