Research On The Altmetrics Evaluation System Of Academic Books' Impact In China

As academic books played an irreplaceable important role in the development and communication of science and civilization in human history,it is of great significance to evaluate academic books.Compared with the research of journal evaluation,research area of academic books evaluation is lagging behind because of a lot of difficulties,where only citation analysis dominated in the quantitative evaluation of books.Under such a bottleneck,the new altmetrics brings new possibilities for the evaluation of academic books,especially the evaluation of books' impact.Simple citation analysis can only reflect part of the academic impact of books,while the multidimension and open of altmetrics match the need to overall evaluate academic books' impact well.Literature investigation shows that existing research of altmetrics mostly centered on the paper level;and existing research of academic books' impact evaluation is deficient in the aspects like comprehensiveness and systematization;and research applying altmetrics to book evaluation is rare.Accordingly,this paper focuses on the evaluation system of academic books' impact on the basis of altmetrics.With the principles of comprehensiveness,objectivity,operability and applicability,this paper constructs an evaluation system of academic books' impact in China based on altmetrics.Firstly,having summarize the existing evaluation indicators,through the analysis of the impact factors of academic books,a multilevel evaluation indicator system which is made up of five dimensions including academic impact,social network impact,usage impact,media impact,organization impact,is established,and the most appropriate data sources for each measure were determined through the network survey.Then,the weights of every subordinate indicators are determined according to the hierarchical model of altmetrics indicators,expert consultation and practical experience,considering the quality of source data.At last,after the quantification way and calculation method are made clear,the complete evaluation system of academic books' impact is shaped.In order to test the usability and effect of the evaluation system,33 academic books of Library and Information Science subject are selected for an empirical study.The results show that this whole evaluation system is reasonable,effective and feasible,and the original intention to evaluate books' impact objectively in the round is reached.There is different certain correlation between impact indexes in some dimensions.And there is more than one method to calculate the comprehensive impact index.Different method has its advantages and disadvantages,so which method to apply depends on the evaluation purpose,evaluation rules and data conditions.What's more,there is a moderate correlation between citation index and comprehensive altmetrics index,but to conclude the correlation is generally true or not still need further verification.This paper preliminarily verifies the feasibility of applying altmetrics to evaluation of academic books' impact.A complete available evaluation system is bring forward,and certain relationship between some indexes is found in the process of empirical study.At the same time,there are some limitations in this study,such as the sample size,qualitative data mining and search object.However,these deficiencies also point out the direction of further research.