Correlating Libcitations and Citations in the Humanities with WorldCat and Scopus Data
Alesia Zuccala, Howard Dalby White · Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) · 2015
The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book’s cultural impact. Torres-Salinas & Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmetric for authors of books in, e.g., the humanities, since the major citation indexes, oriented toward scientific papers, have not served them well. Here, using very large samples, we explore the libcitation-citation relationship for the same books by correlating their holdings counts from OCLC’s WorldCat with their citation counts from Elsevier’s Scopus. For books cited in two broad fields of the humanities during 1996-2000 and 2007-2011, we obtain positive, weak, but highly significant correlations. These largely persist when books are divided by main Dewey class. The overall results are inconclusive, however, because the Scopus citation counts for the books tend to be very low. Further correlational research should probably use the much higher book citation counts from Google Scholar. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis of widely held and widely cited books clarifies the libcitation measure and helps to justify it.