Do prestigious Spanish scholarly book publishers have more teaching impact?
| Date | 19 November 2018 |
| Published date | 19 November 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-04-2018-0094 |
| Pages | 673-690 |
| Author | Amalia Mas-Bleda,Mike Thelwall |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Do prestigious Spanish scholarly
book publishers have more
teaching impact?
Amalia Mas-Bleda and Mike Thelwall
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish
scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.
Design/methodology/approach –Syllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched
for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.
Findings –Most books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one
online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books
published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have
both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on
MA citations.
Research limitations/implications –The results might be different for other publishers. The online
syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.
Practical implications –Authors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should
consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.
Originality/value –This is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.
Keywords Research evaluation, Books assessment, Educational impact, Monographs assessment,
Scholarly book publishers, Syllabus mentions
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
A book is a good vehicle to spread knowledge, culture and languages (Kurschus, 2015).
Scholarly books are important communication channels in the humanities and many social
sciences fields, especially in terms of monographs and edited books (Engels et al., 2012;
Huang and Chang, 2008; Kulczycki et al., 2018; Sivertsen, 2016). More important books may
be published by more prestigious publishers, so some studies have ranked scholarly book
publishers based on citations from Clarivate Analytics’Book Citation Index (Torres-Salinas
et al., 2012) or from Scopus journals (Zuccala, Guns, Cornacchia and Bod). International
commercial citation indexes principally cover prestigious international publishers from the
USA and the UK (Giménez-Toledo et al., 2017; Gorraiz et al., 2013; Torres-Salinas et al., 2014)
and are not suitable for assessing publishers in non-English speaking countries. Some
national book assessment initiatives (Giménez-Toledo et al., 2016) and a diverse range of
indicators have been developed to assess the impact of scholarly books. These include
citations, book reviews, library holdings, editorial prestige and mentions in course syllabi.
Edited books, monographs and textbooks do not have to follow the dense style of typical
journal articles and can be more accessible to students (Hyland, 1999). They also contain
more information about their topic than a journal article and can therefore make a more
substantial contribution to a course. A logical way to assess the educational value of books
is therefore to count how often they are mentioned in course syllabi. Only one large-scale
study has investigated mentions in course syllabi to assess the educational impact of
academic books. It sampled English-language monographs indexed in Scopus but did not
use the results to compare publishers (Kousha and Thelwall, 2016).
The current study explores whether course syllabi can reflect the educational impact of
Spanish scholarly book publishers. It follows a previous study that examined whether
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 70 No. 6, 2018
pp. 673-690
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-04-2018-0094
Received 30 April 2018
Revised 23 July 2018
21 September 2018
Accepted 2 October 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
673
Spanish
scholarly book
publishers
syllabus mentions could be automatically and accurately identifi ed for a set of
Spanish-language books published by scholarly publishers that were prestigious or
productive in Spain (Mas-Bleda and Thelwall, 2018).
Despite the importance of books in academic teaching and the possibility that teachers
consider publisher prestige when selecting books to recommend, this is the first study using
empirical data to investigate publishers for the educational value of their works. Spain is a
suitable test case because of the ability to get reasonably comprehensive information about
published Spanish books from a central source.
2. Background
2.1 The book publishing industry
The global book industry has become concentrated due to acquisitions and mergers, but
also more polarized between large and small publishers (Steiner, 2018). Book publishing is
the largest cultural industry in Europe, with Germany, the UK, France, Spain and Italy
being the largest markets (Federation of European Publishers, 2017). In addition to
businesses, universities are also important publishers of academic books.
Books vary by type, format, edition and language. The Spanish ISBN Agency registered
86,000 ISBNs in 2016, mainly first edition books (98 percent) published by private publishers
(90 percent) in Spanish official languages (91.4 percent; 73 percent in Spanish) and in paper
format (70 percent) (MECD, 2017). Most books were from the social sciences and humanities
(31 percent) and literary works (21 percent), such as literature, novels and poetry (MECD,
2017). In contrast, the ISBN Agencies in Latin America registered 189,857 books in 2016.
These were mainly from Brazil (43 percent) and published in paper format (77 percent) by
commercial publishers (55 percent) (CERLALC, 2017).
2.2 Scholarly book publishing
Scholarly monographs and edited books play an important role in the arts and humanities
and many social science fields (Sivertsen and Larsen, 2012; Thompson, 2002), where they
are frequently used and cited (Huang and Chang, 2008; Sivertsen, 2016). For instance,
67 percent of the documents cited in five representative Spanish humanities journals in
2006–2007 were books (Osca-Lluch et al., 2013).
In Spain, there are 673 scholarly book publishers that produce books of interest to the
scientific, scholarly or university community. They have all issued at least 50 ISBNs and are
among either the 50 percent most prestigious or the 50 percent most productive publishers
(Giménez-Toledo, 2017). Scholarly publishing in Spain accounts for 20 percent of all Spanish
book titles, with law, history, education, economics and linguistics, literature and philology
registering the most ISBNs (Giménez-Toledo, 2017).
University presses tend to focus on scholarly books and have a more multidisciplinary
orientation than commercial publishers (Mañana-Rodríguez and Giménez-Toledo, 2018).
In 2015, Spanish university presses produced 4,681 books, mostly published for the first
time (87 percent), in Spanish (81 percent), in print format (61 percent) and in the humanities
(46.6 percent) and social sciences (29 percent) (UNE, 2016).
2.3 Evaluation-oriented studies of books
Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have stronger national and regional interests
(Hicks, 1999) and usually publish in the language of the nation or culture that is studied
(Engels et al., 2012; López-Navarro et al., 2015; Moed et al., 2002). They also tend to publish in
national journals rather than international journals (Larivière and Macaluso, 2011), although
there are country differences (Kulczycki et al., 2018).
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