Comparative Study of the “Book Reviews” in Iran and the World Based on the Web of Science Data Base

A book review is significant because besides being used by librarians in libraries and information centers to select books. It also helps readers and researchers inform about new books that its least advantage is saving time and careful selection. The effectiveness of new knowledge requires an application— generating knowledge alone and without using previous knowledge cannot achieve its objective, which is to increase awareness. The book review is a way to make the works known and provide proper awareness for society.Regarding the importance of book reviews and the applications of scientometrics in identifying the subject of research and considering that the initial studies of researchers show that there are few studies on analyzing book reviews on the WoS at the global level and specifically in Iran, this research was done to review and analyze “book reviews” indexed in the WoS databases, focusing on the activities of Iranian researchers, and through a comparative study of the situation in Iran with other countries in the world. 

The research adopted a descriptive-analytical survey method and a scientometrics approach. The population consists of all book reviews in 10 years (2010-2019) indexed in the Web of Science databases. To limit publications to book reviews, the book review option was selected. Based on this, 766,100 records were retrieved, which formed the current research population. To analyze the research data, Excel and VOSViewer were employed to draw the map to achieve coherent and clear networks.

The research showed that in the ten years from 2010 to 2019, book reviews covered approximately 3% of the total scientific production in the world and about 0.1% of Iranian documents. The results on Iran’s position in book review demonstrated the rank 47th in the world: in Iran, the book reviews growth rate is 0.07. The study of book reviews by subject in the world based on the 22 subjects of the ESI database showed that the interdisciplinary field is in the first rank, the field of psychiatry and psychology is in the second rank, and the social/general sciences are ranked the third. The findings showed that management, libraries, information retrieval, and librarians, which are part of the interdisciplinary fields, are hot and widely used topics. But in Iran, topics of gender, identity, evolution, capitalism, and ethics are the hot topics of book reviews. In the international arena and management, libraries, information retrieval, and librarians are the hot topics of a book review. This shows that the more specific issues of book review in the world and Iran have different directions and the trend in Iran is not in line with the global trend.

Book review publications have a lower growth rate than entire publications. Based on the subject map, the book review topics are different in the world and Iran. The collaborative coefficient of Iranian authors shows that co-authorship in book reviews is not favorable. According to the pattern of co-authorship of book reviews by Iranian researchers, the coefficient of participation of authors in these articles is 0.092, which shows that a person individually has mostly written book reviews in Iran and there is less the researchers’ willingness to participate.