The diversity of monographs: changing landscape of book evaluation in Poland
| Pages | 608-622 |
| Date | 19 November 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-03-2018-0062 |
| Published date | 19 November 2018 |
| Author | Emanuel Kulczycki |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
The diversity of monographs:
changing landscape of book
evaluation in Poland
Emanuel Kulczycki
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan, Poland
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to determine the characteristic patterns of monographs in the
humanities,social sciencesand hard sciencespublished by Polishscholars. The studyprovides a comprehensive
overview of the Polish book evaluation system to explain how monographs are assessed and illustrate how
changes in thedefinitions of the typesof scholarly book publications influence publication patterns.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper analyses bibliographic records of 42,307 monographs
published by Polish scholars in the humanities and science fields from 2009 to 2016. Through a bibliometric
analysis, the paper investigates the characteristic patterns of the monographs, including authorship,
publication language and length, across three fields.
Findings –The present study demonstrates that changes in the definitions of scholarly book publications in
Poland have significantly influenced the characteristic patterns of monographs. The analysis of the
characteristic patterns across three fields reveals that the monographs are different in terms of
all characteristics. In the entire period, 85.3 percent monographs were written in Polish, 10.1 percent in
English, 1.4 percent in German, 1.1 percent in Russian and 2.1 percent in 39 other languages. The most
significant changes are observed in authorship patterns.
Originality/value –This work offers empirical findings on the characteristic patterns of monographs in the
humanities, social sciences and hard sciences from a non-English speaking country. It discusses a unique
model of book assessment and shows certain consequences of various overly formalized procedures of
evaluation. Thus, the study identifies the major challenges and implications of using highly formalized
procedures for book evaluation.
Keywords Poland, Co-authorship, Book evaluation, Monograph, Publication patterns, Scholarly books
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
It is well documented that scholarly books are the key type of publication used in
the social sciences and humanities (SSH) (Giménez-Toledo and Román-Román, 2009;
Williams et al., 2009). However, scholarly books can also be an important channel of
scholarly communication for researchers in the hard sciences (Bonaccorsi et al., 2017;
Storer, 1967; Tang, 2008).
Scholarly book publications play a major role in the assessment of institutions and
authors. However, scholarly book evaluation is not an easy task and cannot be conducted in
the same manner as an evaluation of journal articles. The evaluation of scholarly books and
the evaluation of journal articles each have unique issues. In terms of scholarly book
evaluation, the main challenges are integrating data for a metric assessment (Zuccala and
Cornacchia, 2016), combining data on books as groups of work (Zuccala et al., 2018),
constructing the lists and rankings of academic publishers (Giménez-Toledo et al., 2016)
and developing commercial book citation indexes (i.e. the Book Citation Index) so that
it is a viable tool for carrying out international studies concerning books (Torres-Salinas
et al., 2013, 2014).
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 70 No. 6, 2018
pp. 608-622
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-03-2018-0062
Received 16 March 2018
Revised 30 July 2018
22 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
This work was supported by the DIALOG Program (Grant name “Research into Excellence Patterns in
Science and Art”). The author would like to thank Ewa A. Rozkosz for her support. The author would
also like to extend the thanks and appreciation to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education for its
support in making the data available for the analyses.
608
AJIM
70,6
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