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A study of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI journals by researchers from five countries: 2006–2015

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Abstract

This article reports a study on the publications of book reviews by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India. The Web of Science database was used to obtain the data concerning the publications of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals from 2006 to 2015. Several results of interest were found. First, the results showed that the annual outputs of book reviews by researchers from Germany, Japan, China, and India increased significantly. Second, the number of book reviews contributed by researchers from Japan, China, and India is much lower than researchers from traditional scientific powers such as USA and Germany. Third, book reviews are published more in areas of social science and arts and humanities than in those of science and technology. Fourth, book reviews are much less cited than publications of other types are.

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Notes

  1. Since the Web of Science cannot generate citation reports with more than 10,000 documents and the number of book review outputs from USA and Germany are more than 10,000, we used the following methods. For those from Germany, we grouped the book reviews by disciplines and retrieved twice, and averaged the two numbers of citations per item. For those from USA, since the total output was much larger than 10,000 (249,660 to be exact), we chose the year 2011 for demonstration purposes. Similar to the method for those from Germany, we averaged the three numbers of citations per item (25,929 items) in 2011.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the comments of the anonymous reviewers. We also appreciate the help of Dr. Dilin Liu at the University of Alabama, who helped us polish the language of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yaoyu Wei.

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Wei, Y., Fan, W. A study of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI journals by researchers from five countries: 2006–2015. Scientometrics 115, 637–654 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2679-9

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