Page 133 - Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.45, 2019

132 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.11, 2019

Office of Chinese Journal of Clinical Rational Drug Use, 2009), which was similar to Bertin and
Atanassova’s statistical results on the citation contents of 80,000 academic articles in the fields of
biology and medicine (Bertin & Atanassova, 2016). It indicated that the location distributions of
same disciplines were more consistent.
(2) Citation intensity
More than three-quarters of the citation intensity values in computer science and sport science
were 1, while the proportion of citations in law, literature and medicine accounted for about 50%.
Many citation intensity values in law and medicine were at the range of 1-2, reaching around 40%.
In contrast, the high citation intensities in literature account for a large proportion, which may be
related to that authors in literature disciplinet end to cite more books, and then resulted in more
citations of books in citing literatures than other disciplines.
(3) Citation length
This paper found that the lengths of citation content between law and medicine, and computer
science and sport science were relatively close, while the lengths of citations in literature were
obviously higher. Meanwhile, there are more case studies in law and medicine, which will take
up more words in the citations. In literature, the citing authors tend to cite the relevant fragments
in books for detailed interpretation, thus the citation contents are longer than in other disciplines.
(4) Citation sentiment
Although most of the citations in all disciplines were neutral citations, the proportion of neutral
citations in sport science reached 93.4%, which was obviously higher than in other disciplines.
In the citations with sentiments, more citations of books were positive citations in all disciplines,
while negative citations in law were high. The causes may be as follows: in law, the citing authors
often summarize experience, find problems and deficiencies by researching and analyzing various
cases. They are more likely to show negative opinions when comparing different points of view
and then lead to negative citations.
In summary, there were significant differences in the citation behaviors of Chinese books in
different disciplines. It also indicated that the relevant research based on the citation behaviors
on Chinese books, such as the scientific evaluation of books, should consider the disciplinary
differences. As mentioned above, the research data in this paper was limited to Chinese books
in five disciplines, hence, the analysis of the disciplinary differences of book citations may have
limitations. As open access becomes easier, academic books will be downloaded, discussed
and cited more (Emery, Lucraft, Morka, & Pyne, 2017). Therefore, we planned to include more
disciplines in the future to obtain citation behaviors on books with larger scale, so as to get more
comprehensive analysis results of disciplinary differences.

5 Conclusions

This paper took citing literatures of Chinese books as the research object, and analyzed citation