Approach to self-publishing with a combination of bibliometric study and social network analysis techniques
| Published date | 07 November 2016 |
| Pages | 902-914 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-02-2016-0030 |
| Date | 07 November 2016 |
| Author | Almudena Mangas-Vega,Raquel Gómez-Díaz,José Antonio Cordón-García |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Approach to self-publishing with
a combination of bibliometric
study and social network
analysis techniques
Almudena Mangas-Vega
Facultad de Traduccion y Documentacion, Universidad de Salamanca,
Salamanca, Spain, and
Raquel Gómez-Díaz and José Antonio Cordón-García
Faculty of Translation and Information Science, University of Salamanca,
Salamanca, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – From the point of view of the book chain, self-publishing is becoming increasingly common
and it is doing so faster in the commercial world than in science. This study aims to analyse the
phenomenon of self-publishing from the point of view of the research being done on it. Thus, in addition
to studying the subject, it is going to be possible to analyse the viability of this methodology as an
analysis technique.
Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is based on a combination of traditional
bibliometric studies and analysis of social networks applied.
Findings – Self-publishing is a phenomenon that is being studied by the scientic community. But the
research on this topic has a low rate of co-authorship and a low relationship between the most prolic
authors and their relevance. The combination of techniques used has proven to be a very good choice for
analyzing the data.
Originality/value – There are not enough works analyzing the research in self-publishing. Because of
the peculiarities of the topic, a combination of various techniques will provide a better approach to its
study, so, this paper contains some results using bibliometrics and others using social network analysis
applied.
Keywords Bibliometrics, Social network analysis, Self-publishing
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
To be effective, scientic communication must be both immediate and easy without
sacricing tested quality. While these are two of the advantages of publishing as a way
of editing books (Cordón-García and Alonso Arévalo, 2010), the lack of quality review
and editing makes many experts consider self-publishing to be unsuitable for scientic
publications (Mangas-Vega, 2014).
There is no doubt that a phenomenon of this magnitude (Alonso Arévalo et al., 2014)
requires study by the scientic community. But, is the potential of this phenomenon for
scientic publishing being taken into account? Is the multidisciplinary points of view
involved being analysed? How deeply are the experts working on this issue? These
questions drive the current study.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
EL
34,6
902
TheElectronic Library
Vol.34 No. 6, 2016
pp.902-914
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-02-2016-0030
To continue reading
Request your trial