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

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, since 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 1357 Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) books published by five university presses during 1961-2012 in one 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.