Library and Information Science

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how many “scholarly books” are published annually in Japan. Quantitative analysis for the situation of information generation and dissermination through media, concerning with the information flow in the academic fields, is essential for considering the structures and functions of information media. As far as the scholarly book is considered, its definition is still unsettled. First of all it is necessary to state the function and content of scholary books, and to know its substantiality. Examing the previous ideas, it seems to be most reasonable to consider the scholarly book from the point of view of its functions and contents. In this paper, scholarly book is defined as a “book that publishes the original research works”.

Following this definition, the research for the amount of scholarly books published in a year was carried out. The research procedures were the following (1)–(3). (1) Random sampling of 1,000 book records from JAPAN MARC book records. (2) Subtraction of the non-scholarly books, seeing the bibliographic data. (3) Subtraction of the non-scholarly books, checking the prefaces, epilogues, citations, references, etc. of each book.

The final “scholarly books” were judged and selected, using the derived data from (1)–(3). (245 books were selected for (2), 108 books for the final result). Finally the amount of annally published scholarly books were estimated, with their percentage of the whole amount of annual published books. Some characteristics of the scholarly book was discussed by this result. In analyzing scholarly books, one always needs to judge the existence of the original research works in a medium and think about the function of books as information media. Consequentially the qualitative approach has been taken up to progress in this research.