Abstract
Dissemination of research results is an important part of basic as well as applied research if not the most important one. A large part of research results is published in scientific literature, and since there are many forms of it, the question arises which form is the most visible and attractive to the world scientific community. The International Consortium on Landslides (ICL), based in Kyoto, Japan, is one of the leading institutions in the field of landslide research and landslide risk reduction. On behalf of ICL, Springer Nature has published the journal Landslides: Journal of the International Consortium on Landslides since 2004. It is a very successful scientific journal with regard to its scientometric parameters. Since January 2018, it has been a monthly journal published in full color in electronic as well as printed form. Another form of dissemination of the ICL scientific and professional activities are published books in the form of monographs and proceedings from triennial World Landslide Forums. This paper discusses the impact of 52 books with 3426 chapters taken from the field of landslide science and published by Springer Nature from 2005 to 2018 in the earth sciences category, using different scientometric parameters, such as Bookmetrix downloads and citations, Scopus citations, Scopus h-index, Google citations, and Google h-index. The analysis was performed on the book chapter level (using mainly citations as the main scientometric parameter) as well as on the book level (using book h-index and percentage of cited chapters). Out of the selected 52 titles, 22 were published on behalf of the ICL, with 1419 chapters. The differences among landslide-related books can be quite large; only a few chapters from analyzed book titles were found to be cited frequently compared to highly cited scientific journal articles. On average, the analyzed 3426 book chapters from 52 landslide-related books have been downloaded since publication over 53,000 times each; 1092 chapters (32%) received 2932 citations (2.68 citations per cited chapter and 0.86 citations per published chapter). The analysis shows that the books published on behalf of the ICL are, together with other landslide-related book titles, on the forefront in the Springer eBook collection Earth and Environmental Science (EES). The selected 52 landslide-related book titles are above the average metrics for the whole EES with regard to the total number of downloads per book, the total number of citations per book, and the total number of readers per book. The ICL-related books are getting more downloads but less readers and citations (so far) as the selected non-ICL-related books. A way in raising the visibility and impact of the ICL books on landslide research community would be to support their open access publication in the form of e-Books as much as possible, and inclusion of ICL books into Web of Science.
Highlights
After years of roaring success for Open Access journals and article-level metrics, there is a new wave of innovation from publishers, funding agencies, and universities assessment around books
The analysis shows that the books published on behalf of the International Consortium on Landslides (ICL) are, together with other landslide-related book titles, on the forefront in the Springer eBook collection Earth and Environmental Science (EES)
In our analysis, we will present results starting from a wider perspective and going into a more detailed presentation, focusing on the landslide-related books published by the ICL since 2005
Summary
After years of roaring success for Open Access journals and article-level metrics, there is a new wave of innovation from publishers, funding agencies, and universities assessment around books. For those in disciplines where the majority of research output is published as monographs, this likely comes as a relief. An increased number of books are annually indexed in citation databases, where we can gain insight into the citation behavior and longevity of books All of these new developments give book authors and editors more credit for their hard work and offer new metrics for research assessments (Academic Book Week 2016). Remarkable differences between the three aforementioned citation databases were confirmed by taking one book as a case study (Bar-Ilan 2010); the differences between WoS and Scopus were visible due to a fact that citations in Scopus are limited to the period of 1996 and onward
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