Comparative analysis of book citations in social science journals by Central and Eastern European authors

Abstract

This study aims to assess the role of authored and edited books in scholarly communication through citation analysis. It focuses on social science journal articles written by authors from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The sample for book citation analysis were references (n = 1,033,926) from research articles (n = 35,501) published in 2726 journals indexed in Scopus, where at least one author was from a CEE country. The journals were classified in 10 social science fields (economics and business, education, library and information science, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and three multidisciplinary fields) and divided into two groups according to the journal publisher’s country (CEE and non-CEE journals). Authored (n = 221,768) and edited books (n = 74,506) were extracted from cited references through an in-depth parsing and cleaning process. The average number of cited references per article in the full sample was 29, with the share of cited authored books of 21.4% and edited books of 7.2%. The share of authored books in cited references in CEE journals was 26.6%, while for edited books it was 7.8%. Sociology is a field where books are almost equally represented in cited references (47%) as articles, while book citations are much less represented in the fields of psychology (28%), economics and business (27%), and information and library science (24%). Additionally, the core book authors were identified across scientific fields, and differences in citing books covered by Scholarly Publishers Indicators versus books published by local/regional publishers were explored.