Giovanni Solimine’s publications: their presence and impact on the internet

Abstract

Giovanni Solimine is an author of great prestige in the fields of Library and Information Science (LIS) and reading promotion. His recent retirement, in November 2021, is a good time to take stock of his vast and varied scientific output, especially in reference to his monographs and journal articles. In this study, we want to take a bibliometric approach and determine the impact of his work based on the citations it has generated. In general, and in Italy in particular, bibliometric studies are rare, but we believe that they can bring new insights to the understanding of his academic figure.
The study is divided in two parts. First, it identifies and briefly describes Solimine’s 563 scientific publications, focusing in particular on the 171 works available online (typology, journals on which he has published, co-authors, etc.). Secondly, it addresses the 344 publications that cited Solimine (for a total of 433 citations) to find out about their distribution in time, their authors and relative affiliations, the journals in which the citation occurred, the language of the publication, and the list of the most cited works. In order to do this, we have created Solimine’s profile on Google Scholar, then we have downloaded the citations and analysed them using Publish or perish software.
The results show that Solimine’s online presence does not reflect the prestige and influence he has gained in the field of LIS in Italy. The main reason for this is that only a minority of his publications were digitised (only 30% is available online) and that he published mainly in Italian. The study, however, also shows that Solimine had a notable impact on authors and institutions in various countries, especially in the Spanish-speaking countries.