Can the impact of non-Western academic books be measured? An investigation of Google Books and Google Scholar for Malaysia

Statut

“Citation indicators are increasingly used in book-based disciplines to support peer review in the evaluation of authors and to gauge the prestige of publishers. However, because global citation databases seem to offer weak coverage of books outside the West, it is not clear whether the influence of non-Western books can be assessed with citations. To investigate this, citations were extracted from Google Books and Google Scholar to 1,357 arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS) books published by 5 university presses during 1961–2012 in 1 non-Western nation, Malaysia. A significant minority of the books (23% in Google Books and 37% in Google Scholar, 45% in total) had been cited, with a higher proportion cited if they were older or in English. The combination of Google Books and Google Scholar is therefore recommended, with some provisos, for non-Western countries seeking to differentiate between books with some impact and books with no impact, to identify the highly-cited works or to develop an indicator of academic publisher prestige.”

URL : http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/Univ_Press_Books_preprintx.pdf

“The sum of all human knowledge”: A systematic review of scholarly research on the content of Wikipedia

Statut

“Wikipedia might possibly be the best-developed attempt thus far of the enduring quest to gather all human knowledge in one place. Its accomplishments in this regard have made it an irresistible point of inquiry for researchers from various fields of knowledge. A decade of research has thrown light on many aspects of the Wikipedia community, its processes, and content. However, due to the variety of the fields inquiring about Wikipedia and the limited synthesis of the extensive research, there is little consensus on many aspects of Wikipedia’s content as an encyclopedic collection of human knowledge. This study addresses the issue by systematically reviewing 110 peer-reviewed publications on Wikipedia content, summarizing the current findings, and highlighting the major research trends. Two major streams of research are identified: the quality of Wikipedia content (including comprehensiveness, currency, readability and reliability) and the size of Wikipedia. Moreover, we present the key research trends in terms of the domains of inquiry, research design, data source, and data gathering methods. This review synthesizes scholarly understanding of Wikipedia content and paves the way for future studies.”

URL : http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/978652/