Assessing bibliodiversity through reference lists: A text analysis approach

The presence or absence of publishers in large bibliographic databases highlights tangible and symbolic differences between small and large publishers, underlining their diverging incentive structures. To assess these differences, this contribution explores reference data from small (open access) publishers’ journals in the Web of Science and Scopus. The analysis focuses on references that are not indexed in these databases and examines them from a text-as-data approach. The study frames two dimensions of relevance – visibility and impact – as proxies for assessing the scholarly bibliodiversity represented by small (open access) publishers’ journals. Overall, the analysis identifies regional and linguistic specificities in the cited references and some observable thematic differences compared to articles from larger publishers. In particular, it can be argued that the visibility and impact of small (open access) publishers’ publications is rather limited in these databases, thus hindering a broader bibliodiversity in the publishing landscape.