Using altmetrics for assessing impact of highly-cited books in Chinese Book Citation Index

With the rapid development of Internet technology, online academic communications are increasingly prevalent, the traditional ways of academic evaluation can’t comprehensively reflect the multi-dimensional impact of scientific publications, therefore altmetrics is widely concerned by scholars because of its objectivity, timeliness and openness. Based on Douban Reading platform, this paper uses descriptive statistical analysis, grouping analysis, correlation analysis and other statistical methods to conduct the altmetrics evaluation of 1000 highly-cited books in Chinese Book Citation Index. The results show that there is a weak correlation between citations and altmetrics indicators, suggesting that they reflect different aspects of books’ impact and they are complementary in the academic evaluation. What’s more, altmetrics indicators are different on discipline and year, the more applicable the discipline is, the higher the values of altmetrics indicators are. Meanwhile, compared with old books, new books published in recent years have an advantage in the altmetrics evaluation.