Mapping Current Scholarly Flows in East Asia: Research Library Holdings of Books Translated from Japanese

Abstract

Research evaluation relies on citation counts of English-language journal articles, leaving monograph-based disciplines and non-Western scholarship largely invisible. This pilot study asks whether library holdings can serve as alternative evidence, using translation from Japanese into Korean as a test case.

From the National Library of Korea catalogue, 32,326 Korean translations of Japanese books published between 2000 and 2025 were harvested. Of these, 5,262 were identified as academic and matched to Japanese originals in CiNii Books. Korean holdings were retrieved from KOLIS-NET and RISS.

Three main findings emerged. First, the median interval between Japanese and Korean publication has been two years in seventeen of nineteen years since 2007 — neither accelerating nor slowing. Second, ranking titles by how widely Japanese university libraries hold the original reveals opposite patterns in Korea: those held by few reach many public libraries but few university libraries, while those held by many reverse this exactly. Third, humanities and social sciences titles reach more Korean libraries than technology titles, despite being fewer in number. Two independent library systems arrive at similar judgments about which books are scholarly. Holdings carry information that citation metrics cannot capture. Collaborators across Chinese, Japanese and Korean are warmly invited.