The Book Citation Index (BCI, BKCI) is an online subscription-based scientific
citation index
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebre ...
ing service maintained by
Clarivate Analytics and is part of the
Web of Science Core Collection. It was first launched in 2011 and indexes over 60,000 editorially selected books, starting from 2005.
Books in the index are electronic and print scholarly texts that contain articles based on
original research and/or reviews of such literature.
Content
The index covers series and non-series books as long as they include full footnotes and the index has two separate editions, a Science edition and a Social Sciences & Humanities edition. The Science edition covers physics and chemistry, engineering, computing and technology, clinical medicine, life sciences, and agriculture and biology. Currently both series only contain books that date back to 2005.
Reception
In their 2014 book ''Beyond Bibliometrics: Harnessing Multidimensional Indicators of Scholarly Impact'',
Blaise Cronin
Blaise Cronin (born 1949) is an Irish-American information scientist and bibliometrician. He is the Rudy Professor Emeritus of Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he was Dean of the School of Library and Information Scie ...
and
Cassidy R. Sugimoto noted that "for impact assessment of book-based fields, bibliometricians need a database with large numbers of books" and that while the Book Citation Index did meet this need,
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical ...
also fulfilled this purpose and was not only free, but was (at the time) more comprehensive for bibliometric analyses.
A 2013 article in the ''
'' remarked on the index's opportunities and limitations. It stated that the "most significant limitations to this potential application are the high share of publications without address information, the inflation of publication counts, the lack of cumulative citation counts from different hierarchical levels, and inconsistency in citation counts between the cited reference search and the book citation index."
They also stated that the Book Citation Index was "a first step toward creating a reliable and necessary citation data source for monographs — a very challenging issue, because, unlike journals and conference proceedings, books have specific requirements, and several problems emerge not only in the context of subject classification, but also in their role as cited publications and in citing publications."
Further reading
*
*
References
External links
Official websiteBook title search form
{{Authority control
Bibliographic databases and indexes
Full-text scholarly online databases
Clarivate
Citation indices