Do prestigious Spanish scholarly book publishers have more teaching impact?

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.Design/methodology/approachSyllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.FindingsMost books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on MA citations.Research limitations/implicationsThe results might be different for other publishers. The online syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.Practical implicationsAuthors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.Originality/valueThis is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.