- Published: 10 November 2016
Book reviews in academic journals: patterns and dynamics
- Weishu Liu ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8780-67091,
- Yishan Ding2 &
- Mengdi Gu2
Scientometrics volume110,pages 355364 [2017]Cite this article
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Abstract
Book reviews play important roles in scholarly communication especially in arts and humanities disciplines. By using Web of Sciences Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, this study probed the patterns and dynamics of book reviews within these three indexes empirically during the past decade [20062015]. We found that the absolute numbers of book reviews among all the three indexes were relatively stable but the relative shares were decreasing. Book reviews were very common in arts and humanities, common in social sciences, but rare in natural sciences. Book reviews are mainly contributed by authors from developed economies such as the USA and the UK. Oppositely, scholars from China and Japan are unlikely to contribute to book reviews.
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Notes
- 1.
The Web of Science category information was retrieved on 17th October, 2016.
- 2.
The number of general articles began to surpass book reviews from 2013 in A&HCI index.
- 3.
Information Science & Library Science is a SSCI category, 44,207 out of 52,097 [84.86%] book reviews in this category were published in the Library Journal. For more information about this journal, please refer to : //lj.libraryjournal.com/.
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Acknowledgements
This research is supported by National Social Science Foundation of China [#16ZD08, #13AZD072, and #12AZD046]. All the views expressed herein are those of the authors who also take full responsibility for any errors. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for his [her] constructive comments and kindly help in editing the language of the manuscript.
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School of Information Management and Engineering, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, 310018, Zhejiang, China
Weishu Liu
Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200052, China
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Correspondence to Weishu Liu.
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Liu, W., Ding, Y. & Gu, M. Book reviews in academic journals: patterns and dynamics. Scientometrics 110, 355364 [2017]. //doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2172-2
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Received: 28 September 2016
Published: 10 November 2016
Issue Date: January 2017
DOI: //doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2172-2
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Keywords
- Book review
- Academic journal
- Web of Science
- Sciences and social sciences
- Arts and humanities
JEL Classification
- I29 Y30