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Beginning this summer and throughout the fall semester, we are working to upgrade the research experience by making ongoing improvements to our Research Guides.
You may encounter changes in the look and feel of the Research Guides website along with structural changes to our existing guides. If you have any questions or concerns about this process please let us know.

Research Impact Metrics

This guide has been adapted from LibGuides created by the Michigan State University Librarians, Erika Weir, Iris Kovar-Gough and Susan Kendall.

Book Metrics - Overview

Determining the impact of a monograph is difficult. There isn't a book equivalent of the Journal Impact Factor. Instead, authors need to rely on proxy measures like book reviews, cited by counts, and availability in libraries to demonstrate reach and engagement. 

Cited By Count

There are two ways to see how many times your book has been cited. Cited by counts for books will always be imprecise because it is impossible to find all the places where your monograph has been cited, but these databases can give you an estimate.  Remember that Google Scholar is not a good source for official citation data since there are many mistakes, shadow citations, and the like. 

Availability

When using WorldCat to calculate availability please note that you may see multiple editions, translations, or formats, of a book. Make sure the holdings you are recording to demonstrate availability accurately reflect the version of the text you are citing.

Reviews

The FAU Libraries do not subscribe to any particular book review database.  However, the FAU Libraries Book Reviews LibGuide, leads to many sources for searching book reviews.