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it difficult to reach a consensus. A practical solution consists then in
extending the list so that it is not a “quality” list anymore. In a study of
management departments Van Fleet et al. (2000) found strong empirical
evidence that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of a
department and the probability of adopting a list (the better ones not
adopting such a list).

8.12.4 Strategic Behavior and Goal Displacement
De Rijcke et al. (2016) point out that any assessment system tends to
change the behavior of researchers - see also the Leiden Manifesto, point
9(Section 8.2). This mainly happens in two distinct ways. The first one is
described as goal displacement: the goal of research is not contributing
significantly to increasing human knowledge and while doing so reaching
certain performance levels, but increasing the value(s) on assessment indi-
cators. The second one is even worse for science: because of assessments
scientists become (even more) risk averse, which influences the topics
that are investigated.

8.12.5 Another Look at the Importance and Visibility of
Books

White et al. (2009) formulated the interesting idea of libcitations.
Libcitations, as suggested by its name, is the number of times a book is
bought by libraries contributing to OCLC’s WorldCat. This approach
would, in particular, be useful in the humanities. Clearly this idea is
mainly applicable in the Anglophone part of the world, more precisely
those libraries (countries) contributing to WorldCat. Yet, the idea of con-
sidering purchases of books as a kind of analogue of article citations is
generally applicable.
Zuccala et al. (2015) compare the ranking of book publishers by their
libcitations with a ranking by the number of citations in Scopus from
journals in the field of history and find that “books by a certain publisher
that are catalogued frequently in international libraries tend to receive
higher citation rates in the journal literature.” In today’s terminology one
could consider libcitations as a form of altmetrics.

8.12.6 International Prizes
Sometimes receiving international scientific prizes, typically Nobel Prizes
or the Fields Medal are part of evaluations and rankings, such as in the