Abstract
Abstract This study compares publisher ratings to the visibility and impact of individual books, based on a 2017 data set from three Nordic performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) (Denmark, Norway, and Finland). Although there are Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) for journals, there is no similar indicator for book publishers. National publisher lists are used instead to account for the general “quality” of books, leading to institutional rewards. But, just as the JIF is not recommended as a proxy for the “citedness” of a paper, a publisher rating is also not recommended as a proxy for the impact of an individual book. We introduce a small fish in a big pond versus big fish in a small pond metaphor, where a “fish” is a book and “the pond” represents its publishing house. We investigate how books fit on this metaphorical fish and pond continuum, using WorldCat holdings (visibility) and Google Scholar citations (impact), and test other variables to determine their predictive value with respect to these two indicators. Our statistics show that publisher levels do not have predictive value when other variables are held constant. This has implications for PRFS and book evaluations in general, as well as ongoing developments related to a newly proposed international publisher registry.
Highlights
The evaluation of scholarly books is a growing theme across Europe, mainly because of their significance to SSH scholarly communities (Zuccala & Robinson-Garcia, 2019) and due to their registration in national databases (Giménez-Toledo et al, 2016)
We introduce a small fish in a big pond versus big fish in a small pond metaphor, where a ‘fish’ is a book and ‘the pond’ represents its publishing house
We investigate book titles: a) that were published by a variety of presses and publishing houses; some from the ‘big pond’ of level 2 to level 3 publishing, and others from the “small pond” of level 0 to level 1 publishing, and b) that can be evaluated according to different measures of an individual book’s overall visibility and impact as a “big fish” or “small fish”
Summary
The evaluation of scholarly books is a growing theme across Europe, mainly because of their significance to SSH scholarly communities (Zuccala & Robinson-Garcia, 2019) and due to their registration in national databases (Giménez-Toledo et al, 2016). We introduce a small fish in a big pond versus big fish in a small pond metaphor, where a ‘fish’ is a book and ‘the pond’ represents its publishing house (see Figure 1) Utilizing this metaphor, we investigate book titles: a) that were published by a variety of presses and publishing houses; some from the ‘big pond’ of level 2 to level 3 publishing (presumably international), and others from the “small pond” of level 0 to level 1 publishing (presumably national or regional), and b) that can be evaluated according to different measures (indicators) of an individual book’s overall visibility and impact as a “big fish” or “small fish”. Established as well as future PRFSs might benefit from this registry's development
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