A ranking of scientific book publishers according to the catalogues of Spanish academic libraries

[Emilio Delgado López-Cózar]

We are pleased to announce the release of Book Publishers Library 
Metrics, a product that offers indicators on the circulation and 
visibility of academic publishers by counting the number of books 
included in the catalogues of Spanish academic and university libraries. 
The product can be accessed from the following URL:

http://www.librarymetricsforbookpublishers.infoec3.es

These rankings have been assembled from a sample of 368,884 academic 
books, included in one or more of the 93 libraries that are part of the 
network of Spanish academic and university libraries (Rebiun). The 
rankings are presented by scientific fields. The details about the 
methodology we have followed and the indicators presented in the 
rankings can be found at 
http://www.librarymetricsforbookpublishers.infoec3.es/layout.php?id=metodologia 
.

The two main objectives of this product are:

• To identify the core of scientific publishers in the Social Sciences 
and Humanities with a wider circulation according to their presence in 
the catalogues of Spanish academic libraries.
• To test the reliability, viability and feasibility of library 
catalogue analysis on a large scale, with the aim of producing 
bibliometric indicators for the assessment of scientific publications in 
the areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The product we are now presenting is a supplement to the one we 
announced a few months ago: Publishers Scholar Metrics 
(http://www.publishers-scholarmetrics.info), which measured the impact 
of book publishers based on citation counts extracted from the books 
published by researchers and professors of Spanish universities in the 
areas of the Humanities and the Social Sciences that were indexed on 
Google Scholar as of 2012.

The experimental nature of this action was also aimed at verifying the 
degree of acceptance of products of this kind in the Humanities and 
Social Sciences communities, which are not as of yet familiar with this 
sort of bibliometric practices. And the best way to do this is to 
display the results obtained in each area of study in order to analyse 
and assess the reactions.

Kind regards,

Emilio Delgado López-Cózar
EC3 Research Group: Evaluación de la Ciencia y de la Comunicación 
Científica
Universidad de Granada
ec3.ugr.es
http://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=es&user=kyTHOh0AAAAJ