Scholarly books and their evaluation context in the social sciences and humanities
Pages | 586-591 |
Published date | 19 November 2018 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2018-271 |
Date | 19 November 2018 |
Author | Alesia A. Zuccala,Elea Giménez-Toledo,Ginevra Peruginelli |
Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Guest editorial
Scholarly books and their evaluation context in the social sciences and
humanities
Introduction
A famous novelist (Stephen King) once said: “good books do not give up all of their secrets
all at once.”Knowing the author, this statement applies easily to horror and suspense
fiction. Yet, it is fair to say that it is also applicable to “good books”published by scholars in
the social sciences and humanities. Unraveling the secret to a scholarly book’s excellence,
including its topicality, written delivery, influence, and longevity, clearly depends on time.
Moreover, assessing what makes it “good”over “time”requires giving due consideration to
the context in which the book was produced. In light of this, we have decided to open up a
special issue in ASLIB Journal of Information Management concerning “Scholarly Books
and Their Evaluation Context in the Social Sciences and Humanities.”
Initially, our aim was to elicit a variety of research contributions related to the following
topics: scholarly book publishing, publisher prestige, quality and specialization, open access
monographs, e-books, original language vs translated monographs, peer review standards
and labels, commercial databases for books, national registries, books in social media and
alternative metrics. This catalog is by no means exhaustive. Our impetus was simply to
invite researchers to examine the special nature of books, which, thanks to Gutenberg’s
press, have become widespread vehicles for sharing ideas and knowledge (Eisenstein, 2013).
For centuries, books have thrived, and now, even in the midst of what was once “crisis”in
the publishing industry, it would be an exaggeration to say that they are “dead”(Thompson,
2002). Calculating the number of citations books receive from journal articles and other
books will neither help us process this industry threat, nor will the creation of new
publishers necessarily motivate SSH scholars to produce more books. Likewise, current
evaluation systems focused on the rapid production of research articles need not discourage
book-oriented scholars either.
While scholarly books are typically excluded from national R&D reports, and
considerations seem to be given too often to research papers indexed in databases like the
Web of Science or Scopus, we encourage researchers and policy makers to push forward.
Allowing scholarly books to do what they were designed to do –i.e. “give up all of their
secrets”over time –lies with the facilitation of “quality”standards in refereeing, “quality”
approaches to editorial publishing, and greater national and international record keeping.
There has been some positive movement in this regard. In turn, we hope that the research
community will continue to examine the visibility of scholarly books, and let stakeholders
know when and where they resonate the most with scholars, as well as the general public.
Guest editorial team
In April 2016, a new COST Actiontitled the European Network for ResearchEvaluation in the
Social Sciences (ENRESSH) was created, and whatfollowed from a number of meetings was
the idea that three of us, as active COST associates, might form a natural team. We are
researchers holding positions at different institutes in Europe, ranging from an Associate
Professor at the Department of Information Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
(A. Zuccala),Tenured Scientist and leaderof the research group on academicbooks (Grupo de
investigación sobre Libro Académico; ILIA) at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas (CSIC) in Spain (E. Giménez-Toledo), and Researcher at the Istituto di Teoria e
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 70 No. 6, 2018
pp. 586-591
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-11-2018-271
586
AJIM
70,6
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