A Comparative Study Of The Academic Book Impact From A Disciplinary Perspective

As the basic carrier of disseminating academic research results and inheriting academic thoughts,academic books carry the irreplaceable mission of promoting scientific prosperity and development.The academic books impact evaluation is of great significance to the communication of academic achievements and the development of discipline.In view of the particularity of the structure and content of academic books,as well as the diversity of the audience,there are inherent defects in the use of peer review or citation analysis to evaluate their impact.Especially in the social media environment,with the rise of big data technology,and the popularity of digital publishing and open access,many aspects of academic exchange and knowledge innovation are deeply affected,and academic books impact is more complex and multifaceted.The emergence and development of Altmetrics provides a new perspective for the impact evaluation of academic books impact.This paper takes academic books from BKCI as the research object.The data set includes 666,527 records in 2013–2017.And Collected the corresponding 9 indicators of altmetric indicators from Altmetric.com,and map all the data to six fields,including arts and humanities,social sciences,clinical and health,engineering and technology,life sciences,physical sciences.By using descriptive statistical methods,this paper compares the performance differences of different disciplines in citation and altmetric indicators.Through the method of correlation analysis,discussing the correlation between citation index and altmetric indexes,as well as between altmetric indexes.Finally,through principal component analysis and cluster analysis,exploring whether there are index clusters and subject clusters caused by similarity.This study aims to improve the understanding of the academic books impact in various disciplines and the application of various evaluation indicators,and provides a reference for the construction of the evaluation index system of academic book impact.Results reveal as follows.(1)The number of academic books in the United States is far larger than that in other countries.All books from six disciplines in China are ranked in the top 10,among which the fields of engineering and technology are ranked second,and the fields of arts and humanities are the least.(2)Among the 9altmetric indicators,altmetric attention score,twitter and reader have higher coverage rate.(3)Compared with the lag of citation evaluation,Altmetrics has more advantages in the evaluation of the impact of academic books published recently.(4)The correlation between citations and altmetric indexes,and different altmetric indexes is weak,which reflects the impact of different dimensions of academic books.For academic books in the field of engineering and technology,its readers index has the potential to be applied to the evaluation of academic influence.(5)The impact of books shows evident disciplinary differences in the citation and altmetric indicators.The academic books of the fields of physical sciences,engineering and technology have the characteristics of high academic impact and low social impact.The academic books of the fields of clinical and health,and life sciences are characterized by low academic impact and high social impact.Although the fields of arts and humanities,and social sciences tend to publish their achievements in the form of academic books more than the fields of sciences,their performances in the two dimensions of academic impact and social impact are not outstanding.