Page 118 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

ZHANG Chengzhi, LI Zhuo, ZHAO Mengyuan, LIU Jiahao & ZHOU Qingqing / Citing behavior of Chinese books based on citation content 117

Citing behavior of Chinese books based on citation

content 〇a ①

〇b *
ZHANG Chengzhi , LI Zhuo, ZHAO Mengyuan, LIU Jiahao & ZHOU Qingqing
Department of Information Management, School of Economics & Management, Nanjing University of Science and
Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

ABSTRACT
The purpose is to analyze the citing behaviors over books from the perspective of citation content, and
to overcome the traditional deficiencies of book impact evaluation based on citation frequencies and
book reviews, so as to improve the accuracy and scientificity of book impact evaluation. We collected
Chinese books from five disciplines including: computer science, law, medicine, literature and sport
science from Amazon.cn. Then we extracted citation contents about these Chinese books from each
citing literature manually and built a corpus with 2,288 citation contents. Finally, we analyzed citation
behaviors over these Chinese books by mining citation locations, citation intensities, citation lengths
and citation sentiments. The experimental results showed that: 1) when citing Chinese books, authors
from five disciplines had different preferences on citation locations; 2) citation intensities mainly
ranged from 1 to 3. In addition, citations in literature had more high citation intensities; 3) the citation
lengths were concentrated between 20 and 160; 4) regarding citation sentiments of Chinese books,
more than 80% citations were neutral. Compared with negative citations, there were more positive
ones.

Keywords
Citation behavior of Chinese books, Citation content, Discipline difference, Book impact assessment

0 Introduction

Books are the carriers for humans to express opinions, preserve information, and disseminate
knowledge. They are also important resources for academic research. How to quickly select high-
impact works from massive books with various qualities is an important topic faced by book
publishers, libraries, academia and scientific research management departments.
Traditional book evaluation methods mostly rely on single data sources, such as citation
frequencies, library holdings or book reviews. For example, Su (2009) selected the highest impact
books according to the principle that “80% of academic impacts in the academic community are
reflected through 20% of books’ citations”. White et al. (2009) evaluated impacts of books by
library holdings. Zuccala, van Someren, and van Bellen (2014) used books’ expert reviews to

① This article is an outcome of the key project “Research on Discipline Construction of Information Science and Future
Development Path of Information Work” (No.17ZDA291) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.
* Correspondence should be addressed to ZHANG Chengzhi, Email: zhangcz@njust.edu.cn, ORCID: 0000-0001-8121-4796