Library Guides: Promotion & Tenure Resource Guide: Book Data

Search Google Books

Google Scholar automatically includes results from Google Books. If you want to just see results from Google Books you can search it directly.

NOTE: It is not possible to specify you want to search in just the book bibliography. Recommend searching for a combination of author surname and some keywords from the title.May have misleading results. No guarantee author name will be near keywords.

SpringerLink metrics

Every book and chapter published by Springer will display the number of citations, downloads, book reviews, readers, and the number of online mentions in policy documents, news outlets, Wikipedia entries and social media networks. If available, these metrics are displayed on the individual book and chapter pages on SpringerLink. They are also available via Papers, the reference manager.

WorldCat Identities

WorldCat Identities
a free website that collects information about book authors and shows aggregated information about the author, their works, and a profile of library holdings worldwide.It can provide a nice at-a-glance summary for an author. WorldCat data is available for authors who have published in the U.S. and is very good at including information on books from "major" publishers. Books published by small presses outside the U.S.are less likely to be included.

Web of Science & Google Scholar

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
similar to Web of Science in that it will enable you to locate citations to almost any type of publication, including books, drawing results from a variety of scholarly websites - including journal publisher sites, university webpages (such as class syllabi and faculty homepages), etc.
Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new window
The traditional source for citations to a specific publication (regardless of the type of publication - book, book chapter, journal article, patent, etc.). The database name is deceptive in that WoS contains cited references from all disciplines, not just science. It will enable you to locate citations to a book or a book chapter that have appeared in any of the WoS core journals.

Other Available Data Sources

Books:

For traditional printed books, publishers can provide data on number of books sold. Another piece of useful data is the number of times a specific book has been checked out from the library (which can be provided by anyone at the Circulation or Circulation Desks). Online books often have download or page hit statistics available from either the publisher or vendor (e.g., if a book is available through Ebscohost and JSTOR - each vendor would have separate download statistics). WorldCat Identities (see box to the left) also offers some useful data. Google Books will allow you to search throughout the text of a book (including the bibliographies) and will bring back a list of books that include your terms in them somewhere. It is not possible to specify searching within the reference lists directly.

Book chapters:

Traditionally, the only real metric for book chapter usage has been the number of times they have been cited. It has been almost impossible to garner usage statistics for non-electronic book chapters; however, electronic books now offer this possibility depending on the publisher/vendor. (NOTE: book chapter citation rates are notoriously inaccurate in that sometimes the book editor is cited instead of the chapter author.)

ALSO NOTE:

Very few databases that provide cited reference information include books or book chapters. Notable exceptions include MLA International Bibliography, PsycInfo and Google Books.

As with all cited reference resources, use the data with caution. None of them do well at providing data on times something was cited incorrectly, unless you can outguess author name misspellings. Few of them do well at covering new and/or interdisciplinary fields. Few of them cover non-mainstream publications such as patents, technical reports, user manuals, or tutorials.