Scholarly book publishing: Its information sources for evaluation in the social sciences and humanities

In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the noncommercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on highly selective procedures by which the coverage concentrates on prestigious international publishers, mainly based in the USA or UK and serving the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine.