When is a book chapter an article?

 One of the tasks as Director of the IQCC is quality control: ensure that the information on the IQCC website is up-to-date, consistent and easy to access. Apart from the ever-changing list of people working and studying within the institute, the list of current funding, the other constantly part is the list of publications. And here comes the most interesting issue of today:

When is a book chapter is chapter, and when can it be considered an article?

At first sight, this seems an odd question, because why would a book chapter be considered as an article? It doesn't make sense. But in fact, this is what some "book series" / "journals" actually are. Even though they are books, with chapters, they count as journals in e.g. Journal of Citation Reports or Scopus; a good example is Topics in Organometallic Chemistry which is listed as journal in both JCR and Scopus.

Nevertheless, CrossRef does not recognize the book chapter DOI as a journal article: instead it correctly identifies it as book chapter.

That leaves the question the same: when can a book chapter be considered a chapter, and when might it count as an article? Note that both Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions include book chapters within the list of publications of researchers. Moreover, the citations to these are included in the total citations for the researcher.

Since the simplest thing (SIB, KISS [1]) to do is to just forget about chapters as being articles, that is the choice I have made recently, and consider my book chapter in Top. Organomet. Chem. as really just a book chapter in New Directions in the Modeling of Organometallic Reactions (A. LLedos, G. Ujaque; Eds.):

M. Swart, "Dealing with spin states in computational organometallic catalysis", In New Directions in the Modeling of Organometallic Reactions, A. LLedos, G. Ujaque (Eds.), Springer, 2020; (Topics in Organometallic Chemistry Vol. 67); p. 191-226

www.dx.doi.org/10.1007/3418_2020_49

References

[1] Simple Is Beautiful; Keep It Simple Stupid