Can we rank scholarly book publishers? A bibliometric experiment with the field of history

This is a publisher ranking study based on a citation data grant from Elsevier, specifically, book titles cited in Scopus History journals (2007-2011), and matching metadata from WorldCat® (i.e., OCLC numbers, ISBN codes, publisher records, and library holding counts). Using both resources, we have created a unique relational database designed to compare citation counts to books with international library holdings or 'libcitations' for scholarly book publishers. First, we construct a ranking of the top 500 publishers and explore descriptive statistics at the level of publisher type (university; commercial; other) and country of origin. We then identify the top 50 university presses and commercial houses based on total citations and mean citations per book (CPB). In a third analysis we present a map of directed citation links between journals and book publishers. American and British presses/publishing houses tend to dominate the work of library collection managers and citing scholars; however, a number of specialist publishers from Europe are included. Distinct clusters from the directed citation map indicate a certain degree of regionalism and subject specialization, where some journals produced in languages other than English tend to cite books published by the same parent press. Bibliometric rankings convey only a small part of how the actual structure of the publishing field has evolved; hence, challenges lay ahead for developers of new citation indices for books and bibliometricians interested in measuring book and publisher impacts.