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Libcitations, worldcat, cultural impact, and fame

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  • Howard D. White
  • Alesia A. Zuccala

Abstract

Just as citations to a book can be counted, so can that book's libcitations—the number of libraries in a consortium that hold it. These holdings counts per title can be obtained from the consortium's union catalog, such as OCLC's WorldCat. Librarians seeking to serve their customers well must be attuned to various kinds of merit in books. The result in WorldCat is a great variation in the libcitations particular books receive. The higher a title's count (or percentile), the more famous it is—either absolutely or within a subject class. Degree of fame also indicates cultural impact, allowing that further documentation of impact may be needed. Using WorldCat data, we illustrate high, medium, and low degrees of fame with 170 titles published during 1990–1995 or 2001–2006 and spanning the 10 main Dewey classes. We use their total libcitation counts or their counts from members of the Association of Research Libraries, or both, as of late 2011. Our analysis of their fame draws on the recognizability of their authors, the extent to which they and their authors are covered by Wikipedia, and whether they have movie or TV versions. Ordinal scales based on Wikipedia coverage and on libcitation counts are very significantly associated.

Suggested Citation

  • Howard D. White & Alesia A. Zuccala, 2018. "Libcitations, worldcat, cultural impact, and fame," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 69(12), pages 1502-1512, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:69:y:2018:i:12:p:1502-1512
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.24064
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    Cited by:

    1. Martin Wieland & Juan Gorraiz, 2020. "The rivalry between Bernini and Borromini from a scientometric perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1643-1663, November.
    2. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Fan Qi & Maria Cláudia Cabrini Grácio, 2021. "Comparison of academic book impact from a disciplinary perspective: an analysis of citations and altmetric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1101-1123, February.
    3. Daniel Torres-Salinas & Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Mike Thelwall, 2021. "Exploring WorldCat identities as an altmetric information source: a library catalog analysis experiment in the field of Scientometrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(2), pages 1725-1743, February.
    4. Yajie Wang & Alesia Zuccala, 2021. "Scholarly book publishers as publicity agents for SSH titles on Twitter," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4817-4840, June.
    5. Zhang, Chengzhi & Zhou, Qingqing, 2020. "Assessing books’ depth and breadth via multi-level mining on tables of contents," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2).
    6. Zhou, Qingqing & Zhang, Chengzhi, 2021. "Impacts towards a comprehensive assessment of the book impact by integrating multiple evaluation sources," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).

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