Normalizing book citations in Google Scholar: A hybrid cited-side citing-side method

Research evaluations based on citations require that the citations are normalized to the disciplinary background in some way. Generally this is done using a citation database such as the Web of Science but recently progress has been made in using citations from Google Scholar. Journal papers are normalized against papers from the same journal; book chapters against other chapters from the book and conference papers against other papers from the conference. But, so far books have not been normalized because there is no obvious reference set of books with which to compare them. The contribution of this paper is to test a hybrid method that uses a citing-side approach to determine the reference set of books but then a cited-side comparison with the citations to these books. The method is technically feasible but, as usual with Google Scholar, it requires extensive manual input.