The field-specific citation and usage patterns of book literature in the Book Citation Index

Abstract

Abstract The usage data provided by Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) implies the scholarly interest of researchers through full text accesses and record saves on the platform. The WoS usage count has been studied for journal papers alongside citations at different levels of journal, country, and field. To extend the results of the previous studies, this study explores the WoS usage counts for book literature in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) to determine the usefulness of the usage statistics provided by the new data source and their different patterns across fields as well as document types. The correlations between WoS citations and usage counts are from weak to moderate in six selected fields. Edited books have stronger correlations between the two metrics than the other two document type groups. Usage data of aggregated book volumes in the sciences correlate with citations significantly and show higher utilization rates than citations. Their usage counts on the same platform are the supplement of WoS citations in the fields. In contrast, book publications in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) present a different pattern of their usage to reduce its ability to coordinate citations. In addition, the low usage of books in SSH may indicate the limited access of the BKCI-SSH and probably lower effectiveness of its usage data compared to the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). However, the further investigation of altmetric usage metrics from different sources confirms an overall lower usage for books in the social sciences than in the sciences.