Normalizing Book Citations in Google Scholar: A Hybrid Cited-side Citing-side Method
Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Jun 07, 2019
Page range: 19 - 35
Received: Feb 04, 2019
Accepted: Feb 25, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2019-0007
Keywords
© 2019 John Mingers,Eren Kaymaz, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Purpose
To design and test a method for normalizing book citations in Google Scholar.
Design/methodology/approach
A hybrid citing-side, cited-side normalization method was developed and this was tested on a sample of 285 research monographs. The results were analyzed and conclusions drawn.
Findings
The method was technically feasible but required extensive manual intervention because of the poor quality of the Google Scholar data.
Research limitations
The sample of books was limited and also all were from one discipline —business and management. Also, the method has only been tested on Google Scholar, it would be useful to test it on Web of Science or Scopus.
Practical limitations
Google Scholar is a poor source of data although it does cover a much wider range citation sources that other databases.
Originality/value
This is the first method that has been developed specifically for normalizing books which have so far not been able to be normalized.