For traditional printed books, publishers can provide data on number of books sold. Another piece of useful data is the number of times a specific book has been checked out from the library. Online books often have download or page hit statistics available from either the publisher or vendor (e.g., if a book is available through ProQuest or EBSCO, each vendor would have separate download statistics). WorldCat Identities (see below) and Google Books provide opportunities to search and extract some citation and publication information.
Traditionally, the only real metric for book chapter usage has been the number of times they have been cited. It has been almost impossible to garner usage statistics for non-electronic book chapters; however, electronic books now offer this possibility depending on the publisher/vendor. (NOTE: Book chapter citation rates are notoriously inaccurate in that sometimes the book editor is cited instead of the chapter editor.)
Very few databases that provide cited reference information include books or book chapters. Exceptions include Scopus, MLA International Bibliography, PsycInfo, and Google Books.
As with all cited reference resources, use the data with caution. None of them do well at providing data on the number of times something was cited incorrectly, unless you can outguess author name misspellings. Few of them do well at covering new and/or interdisciplinary fields. Few of them cover non-mainstream publications such as patents, technical reports, user manuals, or tutorials.
This link opens in a new windowFor every Springer book and chapter you will be able to find the numbers of citations, downloads, book reviews, readers, and the number of online mentions in policy documents, news outlets, Wikipedia entries and social media networks. If available, these metrics are displayed on the individual book and chapter pages on SpringerLink. They are also available via Papers, the reference manager.
This guide was reused and adapted from Promotion & Tenure Resource Guide, by Iowa State University Library. Available: https://instr.iastate.libguides.com/c.php?g=49493&p=318774.
