The academic publishing landscape for books is rapidly changing. Authors, accustomed to the rich analytics around their open access journal articles, are increasingly asking publishers about the citations, usage and interactions with their book titles. Digital publishing is now considered a requirement by many institutions and authors and open access for books is a growing field

Since 2019 ScienceOpen has been tracking citations to books and chapters via Crossref DOIs and now counts more than 4.4 million book records and 1.9 million chapters. That is a lot of books to search, sort and explore in our discovery environment! With our advanced search functionalities, you can easily navigate our list of book records and find the publications that are most relevant to your field of study.

We were curious ourselves about the top titles so put together a few highlights.

Citations

We currently have over 4.1 million book records on ScienceOpen.

You can sort any search by number of citations. Tracking citations for books is much newer and more complex than tracking citations for journal articles. Many print books, and even e-books, do not have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that facilitates tracking. Of the 4.1 million titles in the platform, here are the top cited:

• The operated Markov´s chains in economy is currently the most cited book on ScienceOpen, with 5,170 citations.
• It is followed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with 2,035 citations and Ecological Diversity and Its Measurement with 1,570 citations.

You can change your sort to discover the newest, most viewed, most popular, open access and more. Here are some of our favorites:

Some other best ranking books on ScienceOpen include:

• Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior – Our most viewed book with 9,593 views.
• AJCC Cancer Staging Manual – Our most cited Open Access book with 131 citations.
• Fälle zum Verwaltungsrecht – Our most viewed Open Access book with 1,309 views.
• The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It – Our most popular Book.
• The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment – Our most popular Open Access Book.
• Knowledge for Justice: Critical Perspectives from Southern African-Nordic Research Partnerships -The most viewed for the search term Sustainable Development Goals.

Book Metadata

You might notice that many books do not have very rich information about them – a summary text, keywords and cover are missing. This is because we depend on the metadata – title, author, publisher, date, etc. – deposited at Crossref to create each new record. As an author you can log in with your ORCID and add a summary, cover and keywords to your book titles.

Learn more here on how to promote your research on ScienceOpen.

For publishers we also offer services around book metadata to increase the richness of records for our search algorithms on ScienceOpen to increase discoverability. We can further update records at Crossref so that all services using their databases get richer records. We work with a number of book publishers such as Amsterdam University Press and Michigan Publishing.

Want to learn more?

Please contact us if you are interested in any of our book services.  We are eager to hear from you and would be delighted to provide you with a consultation. Stuart Cooper, our Global Business Development Director, can be reached anytime at Stuart.Cooper@ScienceOpen.com.

Image credits: EvgeniT / Pixabay