Scholarly Credentials Toolkit for TCNJ Faculty: Book Impact

The impact of a monograph has traditionally been more difficult to track than other scholarly communication venues (e.g., peer-reviewed journals). This is changing thanks to Google Scholar, but understand that longstanding measures for tracking journal articles are not available for scholarly books.

Reviews of books published in scholarly journals are another place to look. A judiciously placed quote from a positive book review can help to convince members of promotion and tenure committees that your book has or will have an impact on your discipline.

WorldCat (a union catalog) offers up the truest measure of a book's availability to students and academic researchers. Also helpful with book impact are The Open Syllabus Project and Altmetric for Books. See the Altmetrics page of this guide for more information.