e280409 El profesional de la información, 2019, v. 28, n. 4. eISSN: 1699-2407 1 Evolution of the visibility of scholarly monographs in the academic feld José-Antonio Cordón-García; Javier Merchán-Sánchez-Jara; Almudena Mangas-Vega José-Antonio Cordón-García * htps://orcid.org/0000-0002-8569-9417 Universidad de Salamanca Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación Francisco Vitoria, 6-16. 37008 Salamanca, Spain jcordon@usal.es How to cite this artcle: Cordón-García, José-Antonio; Merchán-Sánchez-Jara, Javier; Mangas-Vega, Almudena (2019). “Evoluton of the visibility of scholarly monographs in the academic feld”. El profesional de la información, v. 28, n. 4, e280409. htps://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2019.jul.09 Manuscript received on 30 th January 2019 Accepted on 16 th July 2019 Abstract Scholarly monographs provide a good example to show the evoluton of the impact that digital publishing has had over the last few decades in the transmission and communicaton of scientfc informaton. On the one hand, in the area of Social Sciences and Humanites relevance in quanttatve terms has been undermined, giving prominence to other do- cument types such as research papers published in academic journals. Moreover, their visibility and accessibility have been conditoned by a number of factors that form an intrinsic part of the digital medium itself. Based on these two fundamental premises, this paper aims to analyze only the situaton of scholarly monographs in insttutonal systems for research assessment and tenure, from the perspectve of the various proposed requirements regarding accreditaton for the diferent fgures of university teaching staf and the request for Spanish recogniton of six-year research periods. Keywords Scientfc monographs; Academic books; Scholarly books; Research assessment; Research productvity; Research evalua- ton; Scholarly publishing; Scientfc communicaton; Scholarly communicaton; Promoton and tenure; Metrics; Spain. 1. Introducton Throughout the history of science, books have been one of the paradigmatc objects for scientfc knowledge transmis- sion. For long periods of tme, they were the primary vehicle for the disseminaton of the new theories and postulates responsible for technical and scientfc transformatons, as well as being a symbolic reference in the socio-cultural feld (Barbier, 2015; Darnton, 2010). In this regard, the writng and publicaton of monographs 1 have, for many centuries, in- vested its authors with the highest levels of prestge and recogniton in the public sphere. In some way, this assessment was related to specifc impediments restrictng access to culture, with its elitst character and limited scope. If culture consttuted a sort of private terrain accessible only to certain social elites, access to the editng, publishing and marke- tng of works’ systems only intensifed these difcultes and obstacles, usually related to decisions by publishers who ar- bitrated the producton and circulaton of works based on a more or less heterogeneous set of scientfc, socio-economic and cultural factors (Bourdieu, 2015). Javier Merchán-Sánchez-Jara htps://orcid.org/0000-0003-1828-5182 Universidad de Salamanca Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación Francisco Vitoria, 6-16. 37008 Salamanca, Spain javiermerchan@usal.es Almudena Mangas-Vega htps://orcid.org/0000-0002-3464-3624 Universidad de Salamanca Departamento de Biblioteconomía y Documentación Francisco Vitoria, 6-16. 37008 Salamanca, Spain almumvega@usal.es