Mapping citation patterns of book chapters in the Book Citation Index

In this paper we provide the reader with a visual representation of relationships among the impact of book chapters indexed in the Book Citation Index using information gain values and published by different academic publishers in specific disciplines. The impact of book chapters can be characterized statistically by citations histograms. For instance, we can compute the probability of occurrence of book chapters with a number of citations in different intervals for each academic publisher. We predict the similarity between two citation histograms based on the amount of relative information between such characterizations. We observe that the citation patterns of book chapters follow a Lotkaian distribution. This paper describes the structure of the Book Citation Index using ‘heliocentric clockwise maps’ which allow the reader not only to determine the grade of similarity of a given academic publisher indexed in the Book Citation Index with a specific discipline according to their citation distribution, but also to easily observe the general structure of a discipline, identifying the publishers with higher impact and output.

► We analyze the citation pattern of book chapters, a document type scarcely explored in the field of scientometrics.
► Information gain allows us to select academic publishers that contribute with more information to a given discipline.
► Heliocentric clockwise maps allow the reader to determine the similarity of an academic publisher with a given discipline.
► Generally, publishers with a higher citation average usually have a higher information gain value and have small output.
► The citation distribution of book chapters follows a Lotkaian distribution with highly skewed distributions.