This is a difficult question, because there are not many databases with a good coverage of books.
You may be interested in a special issue (2010) forthcoming on the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, collecting the papers
presented at a conference held last year in Bremen, and two sessions held at the ASSA 2010.
In an article there, I (with Marcella Corsi and Federico Lucidi) estimate that in Italy's case, considering the number of citations recorded on
Google Scholar, there is a very high difference between subdisciplines of economics. In general, articles on journal with an impact factor
score the highest, then articles on other journals, then books and finally book chapters. However, for example in the history of economic
thought, books appear to fare better. Moreover, the variance within these categories is so high that it is very common to see books or even
chapters widely cited and articles never cited.
I am not reporting here average values becaus,e as it is well known, the distributions of citations are notoriously VERY skewed, and
consequently mean values are not an informative indicator (i.e. single works receive an impressive number of citations, while many others
receive zero, and most works stand on similar, low, values. Thus, the mean is excessively sensible to outliers). You should indeed compare
entire distributions or other statistics (e.g. the median) but indeed there is still no consensus on how to measure citations.
at any rate, you may want to ask Fred Lee (the editor of AJES) when will the special issue be released, and in the meantime you may look at
the several papers published on Scientometrics, Economica, CJE (the debate on the English Research Assessment Exercise).
you may also want to have a look at
Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research (2008), "Citation Statistics", A report from the International Mathematical Union
(IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
(IMS)
best,
Carlo d'ippoliti
Sapienza University of Rome
Il giorno 18/lug/10, alle ore 20:10, Esther-Mirjam Sent ha scritto:
Dear colleague,
Would you have data on the average number of times a scientific article is read versus the same statistics for a scientific book? If this is
too broad a question, would you have numbers for the discipline of economics? Thanks for your help!
Yours,
Esther-Mirjam
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Raadslid, Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling
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