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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of knowledge on how research evaluation in different national and organisational contexts affects, often in unintended ways, research and publication practices. In particular, it looks at the development of book publication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the Czech Republic since 2004, when a performance-based system of evaluation was introduced, up to the present.

The paper builds upon ethnographic research complemented by the analysis of Czech science policy documents, data available in the governmental database “Information Register of R&D results” and formal and informal interviews with expert evaluators and other stakeholders in the research system. It further draws on the authors’ own experience as scholars, who have also over the years participated in a number of evaluation procedures as peers and experts.

The number of books published by researchers in SSH based at Czech institutions has risen considerably in reaction to the pressure for productivity that is inscribed into the evaluation methodology and has resulted in the rise of in-house publishing by researchers’ own research institution, “fake internationalisation” using foreign low-quality presses as the publication venue, and the development of a culture of orphaned books that have no readers.

In the Czech Republic robust and internationally harmonised bibliometric data regarding books would definitely help to create a form of research evaluation that would stimulate meaningful scholarly book production. At the same time, better-resourced and better-designed peer review evaluation is needed.

This is the first attempt to analyse in detail the conditions and consequences the Czech performance-based research evaluation system has for SSH book publication. The paper demonstrates that often discussed harming of SSH and book-writing in particular by performance-based IF-centred research evaluation does not necessarily manifest in declining numbers of publications. On the contrary, the number of books published may increase at the cost of producing more texts of questionable scholarly quality.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the characteristic patterns of monographs in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences published by Polish scholars. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the Polish book evaluation system to explain how monographs are assessed and illustrate how changes in the definitions of the types of scholarly book publications influence publication patterns.

This paper analyses bibliographic records of 42,307 monographs published by Polish scholars in the humanities and science fields from 2009 to 2016. Through a bibliometric analysis, the paper investigates the characteristic patterns of the monographs, including authorship, publication language and length, across three fields.

The present study demonstrates that changes in the definitions of scholarly book publications in Poland have significantly influenced the characteristic patterns of monographs. The analysis of the characteristic patterns across three fields reveals that the monographs are different in terms of all characteristics. In the entire period, 85.3 percent monographs were written in Polish, 10.1 percent in English, 1.4 percent in German, 1.1 percent in Russian and 2.1 percent in 39 other languages. The most significant changes are observed in authorship patterns.

This work offers empirical findings on the characteristic patterns of monographs in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences from a non-English speaking country. It discusses a unique model of book assessment and shows certain consequences of various overly formalized procedures of evaluation. Thus, the study identifies the major challenges and implications of using highly formalized procedures for book evaluation.

Citations have been used as a common basis to measure the academic accomplishments of scientific books. However, traditional citation analysis ignored content mining and without consideration of citation equivalence, which may lead to the decline of evaluation reliability. Hence, this paper aims to integrate multi-level citation information to conduct multi-dimensional analysis.

In this paper, books’ academic impacts were measured by integrating multi-level citation resources, including books’ citation frequencies and citation-related contents. Specifically, firstly, books’ citation frequencies were counted as the frequency-level metric. Secondly, content-level metrics were detected from multi-dimensional citation contents based on finer-grained mining, including topic extraction on the metadata and citation classification on the citation contexts. Finally, differential metric weighting methods were compared with integrate the multi-level metrics and computing books’ academic impacts.

The experimental results indicate that the integration of multiple citation resources is necessary, as it can significantly improve the comprehensiveness of the evaluation results. Meanwhile, compared with the type differences of books, disciplinary differences need more attention when evaluating the academic impacts of books.

Academic impact assessment of books via integrating multi-level citation information can provide more detailed evaluation information and cover shortcomings of methods based on single citation data. Moreover, the method proposed in this paper is publication independent, which can be used to measure other publications besides books.

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users’ sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution in terms of shares of scholarly book publications in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in five European countries, i.e. Flanders (Belgium), Finland, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. In addition to aggregate results for the whole of the social sciences and the humanities, the authors focus on two well-established fields, namely, economics & business and history.

Comprehensive coverage databases of SSH scholarly output have been set up in Flanders (VABB-SHW), Finland (VIRTA), Norway (NSI), Poland (PBN) and Slovenia (COBISS). These systems allow to trace the shares of monographs and book chapters among the total volume of scholarly publications in each of these countries.

As expected, the shares of scholarly monographs and book chapters in the humanities and in the social sciences differ considerably between fields of science and between the five countries studied. In economics & business and in history, the results show similar field-based variations as well as country variations. Most year-to-year and overall variation is rather limited. The data presented illustrate that book publishing is not disappearing from an SSH.

The results presented in this paper illustrate that the polish scholarly evaluation system has influenced scholarly publication patterns considerably, while in the other countries the variations are manifested only slightly. The authors conclude that generalizations like “performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) are bad for book publishing” are flawed. Research evaluation systems need to take book publishing fully into account because of the crucial epistemic and social roles it serves in an SSH.

The authors present data on monographs and book chapters from five comprehensive coverage databases in Europe and analyze the data in view of the debates regarding the perceived detrimental effects of research evaluation systems on scholarly book publishing. The authors show that there is little reason to suspect a dramatic decline of scholarly book publishing in an SSH.

Websites have their own features in aspect preference (e.g. the relative importance platforms place on product aspects in product evaluation). The purpose of this paper is to capture characteristics of different book reviews on aspect preferences by opinion mining techniques.

The authors employ two indicators for identifying aspect preferences, and propose a method for quantifying overall differences of reviews on aspect preferences through three dimensions: aspect awareness, aspect satisfaction and comprehensive value.

The results show that book reviews on e-commerce websites contain information about external aspects of a book (e.g. hardcover), while those on social network websites pay more attention to content-related aspects of the book (e.g. stories). These results indicate that aspect preferences of reviews vary from platforms and make it hard to evaluate book comprehensively based on single-source data. Online book reviews from a wide range of sources can assess book impact from multiple perspectives and dimensions.

In order to illustrate the value of the authors’ method, the authors show book impact assessment based on multi-source data as an application of these difference analyses. Furthermore, the authors present an example of a book promotion to provide customized marketing services for different user clusters.

This study investigates the influence of different data sources on book evaluation from the content of book reviews. The authors also showcase potential applications of these analyses in book impact assessment.

In recent years, readers have limited amounts of time to pick the right books to read from a market that is filled with similar types of books. Aiming to read only good books, readers tend to check book reviews written by others. However, it is very difficult to find good book reviews. The aim of this paper is to present a book review recommendation system that collects reviews from heterogeneous sources on the Internet and performs quality judgments automatically. Users can then read the top‐ranked reviews suggested by this recommendation system.

In this paper, a book review recommendation system is constructed to collect, process, and judge the quality of book reviews from various heterogeneous sources. The quality measurement of book reviews uses review‐evaluation techniques. The prediction results were validated with a ranking list produced by experts.

The proposed system is effective and suitable for recommending quality book reviews from heterogeneous sources. The proposed quality measurement method is more effective than other more commonly used methods.

This paper is one of the first to apply review evaluation techniques to the process of book review recommendation. The proposed system can collect and recognize book reviews from different websites with various forms of presentation. This evaluation shows that the quality measurement method produces better results than do other methods, such as ranking by rating score or by the date that the review was posted. Those methods are primarily used by commercial websites.