著者

山本 耕平

出版者

京都大学大学院文学研究科社会学研究室

雑誌

京都社会学年報 = Kyoto journal of sociology

巻号頁・発行日

no.25, pp.17-33, 2017-12

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This paper is an attempt to measure the impact of Japanese social science books using Google Scholar and Google Books. While it has often been noted that Japanese social scientists are likely to use books rather than journal articles as their tool for scholarly communication, there have been few attempts to measure the impact of books such as by citation counts. One obstacle to those attempts is that there has been no database that enables us to gather information about different types of scholarly publications other than journal articles. Google Scholar and Google Books, that index information of a much wider range of scholarly publications than existing databases like Science Citation Index, are expected to provide a clue to solve this problem. To explore how many times they are cited, and what types of document contribute to their citation counts, this paper counts the number of citations to eight representative books of Kakusa Shakai-ron (social inequality studies) which were published between 1995 and 2012 using Google Scholar and Google Books. The citing documents are classified into four categories: book, journal article, bulletin paper, and other types of publication (e.g. conference paper). Citation counts from journal articles and those from bulletin papers correlate strongly with total citation counts, while those from books do not Citations from bulletin papers contribute to the growth rate of total citation counts more than those from journal articles do. Overall, the types of publication which are not indexed in the existing database such as bulletin papers have a substantial effect on the impact of social science books. This result indicates the need to pay attention to the wide range of scholarly publications indexed in Google Scholar/Books.