The Book Citation Index (BCI, BKCI) is an online subscription-based scientific citation indexing service maintained by Clarivate Analytics and is part of the Web of Science Core Collection.
[2] Books in the index are electronic and print scholarly texts that contain articles based on original research and/or reviews of such literature.
[4] A 2013 article in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology remarked on the index's opportunities and limitations.
It stated that the "most significant limitations to this potential application are the high share of publications without address information, the inflation of publication counts, the lack of cumulative citation counts from different hierarchical levels, and inconsistency in citation counts between the cited reference search and the book citation index.
"[5] They also stated that the Book Citation Index was "a first step toward creating a reliable and necessary citation data source for monographs — a very challenging issue, because, unlike journals and conference proceedings, books have specific requirements, and several problems emerge not only in the context of subject classification, but also in their role as cited publications and in citing publications.