Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: edited books, book series and types of publishers in the Book Citation Index

This paper presents a first approach to analyzing the factors that determine the citation characteristics of books. For this we use the Thomson Reuters’ Book Citation Index, a novel multidisciplinary database launched in 2010 which offers bibliometric data of books. We analyze three possible factors which are considered to affect the citation impact of books: the presence of editors, the inclusion in series and the type of publisher. Also, we focus on highly cited books to see if these factors may affect them as well. We considered as highly cited books, those in the top 5% of the most highly cited ones of the database. We define these three aspects and we present the results for four major scientific areas in order to identify field-based differences (Science, Engineering & Technology, Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities). Finally we conclude observing that differences were noted for edited books and types of publishers. Although books included in series showed higher impact in two areas.