博主按：下文中的书稿指的是丁颖、罗纳尔德.鲁索等合著的Measuring Scholarly Impact：Methods and Practice（测度学术影响：方法与实践）。施普林格出版社于2013年5月就该书稿是否值得出版征询我的意见，我表示，此书非常值得出版。2014年11月，该书问世。我2015年1月发表了对此书的评介，见http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1557-856205.html。

就一篇英文书稿是否值得出版回答施普林格出版社的6个问题

武夷山

2013年5月22日

1.  Is there a need for this book?

Yes. Here I just cite the need in China as an example. Post-graduates Department of our institute would very much like to identify such books and recommend them to our Library and Information Science master’s degree students and post-doc researchers—we would recruit more than 30 full time postgraduate students and some 20 post-docs annually in our institute. There are more than 60 universities or research institutes that are authorized to grant master’s degrees in library and information science. All these institutes’ libraries would collect book titles in scientometrics.

2.  Who would buy this book?

In addition to post-graduates, Ph D candidates and post-docs, some practitioners in scholarly impact and research evaluation would also have strong interest in it.

3.  Would you buy this book?

Probably not, but more important than my personal purchase, I would consider seriously whether or not to sign a copyright agreement with the publisher about  translating it into Chinese. In fact, as a scientometrician, I have organized the translation of many book titles in scientometrics and informetrics, including The Challenge of Scientometrics, Metrics of Science and Technology, Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation, and so on. 

4.  Does the book treat the subject in a new or different way?

Yes. Judging from the table of contents, the authors give a comprehensive introduction to the state of the art in each relevant topics. Such a book would serve as a good guidebook for practitioners and early-career researchers in academic impact assessment.

5.  Is the author well-recognized in the field?

Ying Ding is a young, promising scholar. In fact, some of her contributions to the Journal of the American Society in Information Science and Technology, the best journal in our field, was reviewed by myself and her innovativeness reflected in her manuscripts was quite impressive. Prof. Rousseau is the current Chairman of the International Society of Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI), a top-notched scholar, and the winner of the Price Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize in scientometrics field. He is very erudite and meticulous. With him as a co-author, the quality of the book will be ensured. I am relatively not so familiar with the third author but I did read a lot of his papers.

6.  Should this book be published?

Definitely yes. When I persuaded Chinese publishers to make up their minds to publish a Chinese version of English books in scientometrics, they were often concerned about the size of the potential market so they decided to print fewer copies for the first print. But every time I was proved right and they were proved wrong in terms of the book market prediction.