Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from eight European countries

A Bibliometric Review of Constituents, Themes, and Trends in Online Medical Consultation Research

As an emerging form of health care with accelerated growth in recent years, online medical consultation (OMC) has received extensive attention worldwide. Although the number of studies on OMC has increased substantially, few provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of OMC's research constituents, themes, and trends. This study, therefore, extracted 1,801 OMC-related articles published in English from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database during the past 30 years and employed a bibliometric analysis of WoS and CiteSpace to examine major constituents' distribution, collaboration relationships, themes, and trends. The results indicate that the United States, England, and China contributed the most to the proliferation of OMC studies. The United States had the greatest academic influence and the most collaborative connections, while China demonstrated the sharpest increase and most active development in recent years. However, there is a lack of substantial and close collaboration between researchers worldwide. The main themes of OMC research were Internet hospitals, COVID-19, mixed methods, online health community, and information technology. Researchers have recently shifted their attention to social media, management, efficacy, word of mouth, mental health, and anxiety. This review paper provides researchers and practitioners with a holistic and clear understanding of the features and trends of OMC research. It also identifies potential areas for future OMC research and sheds light on OMC practices.

Numbers of publications and citations for researchers in fields pertinent to the social services: a comparison of peer-reviewed journal publications across six disciplines

Timely dissemination of knowledge is essential and fosters development of knowledge both within academe and the wider society, not least for knowledge that serves practises outside of academia. Here, we compare six disciplines which provide health-related knowledge that serve the health and social services. Most previous research compares the size and impact of the body of publications belonging to each discipline, which ignores the distribution of seniority, productivity, and impact amongst researchers. Instead, we consider the whole population of academics in Sweden employed or active within each discipline, including those who have nil publications. The disciplines form three clusters, where researchers in Public Health and Nursing and Caring science claim about 15 articles per author, Psychology about 10, and Education, Sociology and Social Work less than four. Their numbers of citations follow the same pattern, and are substantially correlated with the number of articles. Tenured or full professors had about 50% more publications and citations per publication than had associate professors. The distributions indicate clear modes at 0, 4, and 16 publications for each cluster, and provide the proportions of researchers within each discipline who have no such publications at all. We discuss the implications of these results for policy, practice, and knowledge quality in the social services and the welfare sector.

Research performance and scholarly communication profile of competitive research funding: the case of Academy of Finland

The Academy of Finland (AKA), Finland’s major public research funding agency, uses a Web of Science (WoS) based bibliometric indicator to assess the performance of research it has funded. We use an alternative methodology to compare (1) the research performance and (2) the scholarly communication profile of AKA-funded research to the Finnish universities’ entire output across the major fields of arts and sciences. Our data consists of 142,742 publications (years 2015–2018) registered in the national information service, which integrates Current Research Information System (CRIS) data of 13 Finnish universities. Research performance is analyzed using the Finnish community-curated expert-based rating of publication channels (so-called JUFO). Our results show that compared to the Finnish universities’ entire output a larger share of AKA-funded research is published in leading JUFO rated journals and book publishers. JUFO and WoS-based indicators produced consonant results regarding the performance of AKA-funded research. Analysis of publication profiles shows that AKA-funded research is more focused than the universities’ output on using peer-reviewed publications, articles published in journals, English language, foreign publishers and open access publishing. We conclude that the CRIS-based publication data can support multidimensional assessments of research performance and scholarly communication profiles, potentially also in other countries and institutions. CRIS development and maintenance require multi-stakeholder commitment, resources and incentives to ensure data quality and coverage. To fully recognize diverse open science practices and to enable international comparisons, CRISs need further development and integration as data sources.

Evaluation of the arts in performance-based research funding systems: An international perspective

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the evaluation of the arts within performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs). Previous literature on PRFSs has overlooked the arts and focussed primarily on outputs in relation to the sciences and humanities. We develop a typology of how artistic outputs are evaluated within 10 countries’ PRFSs, operating in Australia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, and the UK, and identify three different types of artistic evaluation systems. The study compares evaluation methods and provides a classification of quality criteria used by evaluation panels. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges specific to different types of systems.

The case for the Humanities Citation Index (HuCI): a citation index by the humanities, for the humanities

Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory characteristics for humanities scholars, while no comprehensive citation index is published by a public organisation. We argue that an open citation index for the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve and accelerate the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all stakeholders (including publishers) and it would contribute research data to fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that the citation index should be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the humanities. We discuss four such requirements: source coverage must be comprehensive, including books and citations to primary sources; there needs to be chronological depth, as scholarship in the humanities remains relevant over time; the index should be collection driven, leveraging the accumulated thematic collections of specialised research libraries; and it should be rich in context in order to allow for the qualification of each citation, for example, by providing citation excerpts. We detail the fit-for-purpose research infrastructure which can make the Humanities Citation Index a reality. Ultimately, we argue that a citation index for the humanities can be created by humanists, via a collaborative, distributed and open effort.

Winners and runners-up alike?-a comparison between awardees and special mention recipients of the most reputable science award in Colombia via a composite citation indicator

The research agenda on global academic elites (e.g., those awarded the Nobel Prize) has overlooked academic awards and elites from developing countries and the public symbolic recognition of scientific elites by research awards. In this study, we examine the bibliometric features of individual researcher profiles of those participants who received a special mention in Colombia's most prestigious prize in the sciences: the Alejandro Ángel Escobar Prize (AAEP). First, we chart the citation per article trend of Colombia's most prolific researchers before and after receiving the special mention and the AAEP. We then compare the special mention group with those awarded the AAEP, using a composite citation indicator of six scientific impact and productivity indices to estimate (1) bulk impact (number of citations and h index) and (2) authorship order adjusted impact (Schreiber hm index; total citations for articles of which the scientist is the single author; total citations for articles of which the scientist is the single or first author; and total citations for articles of which the scientist is the single, first, or last author). Results show that there is no overall halo effect in citation per article after receiving the special mention or the AAEP. Such recognition comes after an academically productive career marked by multiple citations per article peaks. There is no clear-cut division between the composite citation indicator of those awarded a special mention and those awarded the AAEP. Findings place the profile of local authors in an adjusted and inclusive framework that takes full cognisance of the scientific elites in developing countries.

Local emergence, global expansion: understanding the structural evolution of a bi-lingual national research landscape

Research institutions organize their scientific activities in an increasingly diverse landscape. In matters of global interest, research relies on an ever-more cross-disciplinary background, which reveals intriguing questions concerning the local dynamics vs. global audiences. This paper proposes new methodological tools to assess, from a strategic perspective, the evolution of a given research landscape. It relies on the Global Research Institute of Paris’ recent experience, a new interdisciplinary Institute focusing on globalization topics beyond the usual economic meaning. The Institute leans on a broad and diverse set of research units of the Université de Paris and relates to the broad landscape of social sciences in France. This article charts the evolution of French authors’ scientific publications on the Institute’s thematic interests in French and English. It focuses on the structural features of the debate, namely the volume, the underlying historical semantic structure, and its main thematic domains. The paper offers significant evidence to understand knowledge circulation dynamics and links that non-speaking countries’ scientific literature builds with the English one.

The Colombian scientific elite-Science mapping and a comparison with Nobel Prize laureates using a composite citation indicator

A well-established agenda on the research output, impact, and structure of global scientific elites such as Nobel Prize laureates has generated interest in the scientific elites from developing countries. However, this topic has not been investigated in detail. This study, first, deploys science mapping techniques to provide a comprehensive analysis of the output, impact, and structure of the Colombian scientific elite, i.e., researchers awarded with the Alejandro Ángel Escobar Foundation National Prize 1990-2020, known locally as the Colombian Nobel. Second, we conducted a productivity and impact comparison between the Colombian scientific elite and Nobel Prize laureates in science and economics by means of a stratified random sample 1990-2020 via the composite citation indicator proposed by Ioannidis et al. Findings showed that the Colombian scientific elite has a broader agenda than indexing titles in internationally renowned bibliographic databases. The Colombian scientific elite also showed positive growth, which is an inverse trend compared with the sample of Nobel laureate productivity. There were no noticeable changes in productivity/impact before and after receiving the Alejandro Ángel Escobar Foundation National Prize. Institutional collaboration within the Colombian scientific elite displayed the highest betweenness (brokerage) role of world/local top-tier universities. However, only two Colombian scientific elite members published an article with two Nobel Prize laureates. Most of the research profiles reflected the national output priorities, but were found to diverge from the national focus in respect of strategic research capacities. The interleaving of the Colombian scientific elite and Nobel Prize laureates-particularly between the 3rd and 2nd quartiles-enabled a more nuanced analysis of the local impact in the global scientific landscape. Our findings also contrast with previous findings on the lower research impact of authors from Latin America, despite their involvement as contributors to reputable journals, and also shed light on the research performance-impact standards and agenda between the global North and South and provide an in-context assessment of outstanding local research.

From indexation policies through citation networks to normalized citation impacts: Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions as varying resonance chambers

Dimensions was introduced as an alternative bibliometric database to the well-established Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, however all three databases have fundamental differences in coverage and content, resultant from their owners’ indexation philosophies. In light of these differences, we explore here, using a citation network analysis and assessment of normalized citation impact of overlapping publications indexed in all three databases, whether the three databases offer structurally different perspectives of the bibliometric landscape or if they are essentially homogenous substitutes. Our citation network analysis of core and exclusive 2016–2018 publications revealed a large set of core publications indexed in all three databases that are highly self-referential. In comparison, each database selected a set of exclusive publications that appeared to hold similarly low levels of relevance to the core set and to one another, with slightly more internal communication between exclusive publications in Scopus and Dimensions than WoS. Our comparison of normalized citations for 41,848 publications indexed in all three databases found that German sectors were valuated as more impactful in Scopus and Dimensions compared to WoS, particularly for sectors with an applied research focus. We conclude that the databases do present structurally different perspectives, although Scopus and Dimensions with their additional circle of applied research vary more from the more base research-focused WoS than they do from one another.

A study of 25 years of publication outputs in the German academic profession

In the weak evaluation state of Germany, full professors are involved in the traditional social governance partnership between the state, and the self-governing higher education institutions (HEI) and disciplinary associations. Literature suggests that formal and informal governance could trigger changes in academics’ publication behavior by valorizing certain publication outputs. In the article, secondary data from three surveys (1992, 2007 and 2018) is used for a multi-level study of the evolution of academics’ publication behavior. We find a trend toward the “model” of natural science publication behavior across all disciplines. On the organizational level, we observe that a strong HEI research performance orientation is positively correlated with journal articles, peer-reviewed publications, and co-publications with international co-authors. HEI performance-based funding is only positively correlated with the share of peer-reviewed publications. At the level of individual disciplines, humanities and social sciences scholars adapt to the peer-reviewed journal publication paradigm of the natural sciences at the expense of book publications. Considering how the academic profession is organized around reputation and status, it seems plausible that the academic profession and its institutional oligarchy are key contexts for the slow but steady change of academics’ publication behavior. The trend of changing academics’ publication behavior is partly related to HEI valorization of performance and (to a lesser extent) to HEI performance based-funding schemes, which are set by the strong academic profession in the weak evaluation state of Germany.

Ensuring Quality and Status: Peer Review Practices in Kriterium, A Portal for Quality-Marked Monographs and Edited Volumes in Swedish SSH

Although established forms of peer review are often criticized for being slow, secretive, and even unfair, they are repeatedly mentioned by academics as the most important indicator of quality in scholarly publishing. In many countries, the peer review of books is a less codified practice than that of journal articles or conference papers, and the processes and actors involved are far from uniform. In Sweden, the review process of books has seldom been formalized. However, more formal peer review of books has been identified as a response to the increasing importance placed on streamlined peer-reviewed publishing of journal articles in English, which has been described as a direct challenge to more pluralistic publication patterns found particularly in the humanities. In this study, we focus on a novel approach to book review, Kriterium, where an independent portal maintained by academic institutions oversees the reviewing of academic books. The portal administers peer reviews, providing a mark of quality through a process which involves reviewers, an academic coordinator, and an editorial board. The paper studies how this process functions in practice by exploring materials concerning 24 scholarly books reviewed within Kriterium. Our analysis specifically targets tensions identified in the process of reviewing books with a focus on three main themes, namely the intended audience, the edited volume, and the novel role of the academic coordinator. Moreover, we find that the two main aims of the portal–quality enhancement (making research better) and certification (displaying that research is of high quality)–are recurrent in deliberations made in the peer review process. Consequently, we argue that reviewing procedures and criteria of quality are negotiated within a broader discussion where more traditional forms of publishing are challenged by new standards and evaluation practices.

Towards complexity-sensitive book metrics for scholarly monographs in national databases for research output

Purpose

This study investigates an approach to book metrics for research evaluation that takes into account the complexity of scholarly monographs. This approach is based on work sets – unique scholarly works and their within-work related bibliographic entities – for scholarly monographs in national databases for research output.

Design/methodology/approach

This study examines bibliographic records on scholarly monographs acquired from four European databases (VABB in Flanders, Belgium; CROSBI in Croatia; CRISTIN in Norway; COBISS in Slovenia). Following a data enrichment process using metadata from OCLC WorldCat and Amazon Goodreads, the authors identify work sets and the corresponding ISBNs. Next, on the basis of the number of ISBNs per work set and the presence in WorldCat, they design a typology of scholarly monographs: Globally visible single-expression works, Globally visible multi-expression works, Miscellaneous and Globally invisible works.

Findings

The findings show that the concept “work set” and the proposed typology can aid the identification of influential scholarly monographs in the social sciences and humanities (i.e. the Globally visible multi-expression works).

Practical implications

In light of the findings, the authors outline requirements for the bibliographic control of scholarly monographs in national databases for research output that facilitate the use of the approach proposed here.

Originality/value

The authors use insights from library and information science (LIS) to construct complexity-sensitive book metrics. In doing so, the authors, on the one hand, propose a solution to a problem in research evaluation and, on the other hand, bring to attention the need for a dialogue between LIS and neighbouring communities that work with bibliographic data.

Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation. We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge. We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important. Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences. As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

Journal article publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A comparison of Web of Science coverage for five European countries

This study compares publication pattern dynamics in the social sciences and humanities in five European countries. Three are Central and Eastern European countries that share a similar cultural and political heritage (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland). The other two are Flanders (Belgium) and Norway, representing Western Europe and the Nordics, respectively. We analysed 449,409 publications from 2013–2016 and found that, despite persisting differences between the two groups of countries across all disciplines, publication patterns in the Central and Eastern European countries are becoming more similar to those in their Western and Nordic counterparts. Articles from the Central and Eastern European countries are increasingly published in journals indexed in Web of Science and also in journals with the highest citation impacts. There are, however, clear differences between social science and humanities disciplines, which need to be considered in research evaluation and science policy.

Tracing the context in disciplinary classifications: A bibliometric pairwise comparison of five classifications of journals in the social sciences and humanities

Despite the centrality of disciplinary classifications in bibliometric analyses, it is not well known how the choice of disciplinary classification influences bibliometric representations of research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This is especially crucial when using data from national databases. Therefore, we examine the differences in the disciplinary profile of an article along with the absolute and relative number of articles across disciplines using five disciplinary classifications for journals. We use data on journal articles (2006–2015) from the national bibliographic databases VABB-SHW in Flanders (Belgium) and Cristin in Norway. Our study is based on pairwise comparisons of the local classifications used in these databases, the Web of Science subject categories, the Science-Metrix, and the ERIH PLUS journal classifications. For comparability, all classifications are mapped to the OECD Fields of Research and Development classification. The findings show that the choice of disciplinary classification can lead to over- or underestimation of the absolute number of publications per discipline. In contrast, if the focus is on the relative numbers, the choice of classification has practically no influence. These findings facilitate an informed choice of a disciplinary classification for journals in SSH when using data from national databases.

Toward internationalization: A bibliometric analysis of the social sciences in Mainland China from 1979 to 2018

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data from Chinese researchers in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of how social science research in Mainland China has internationalized over the past four decades. The findings show that the number of social science articles published by Chinese authors in international journals has experienced a noticeable increase, and the collaboration networks of researchers from Mainland China have broadened, with the number of articles with a Chinese first author showing a strong upward trend. In addition, findings show that Chinese scholars are published in a wider range of journals, and there has been a steady increase in their appearance in higher impact journals (influenced in part by certain journals). Finally, different social science disciplines show various degrees of internationalization. This study provides a broad view from which to examine the internationalization process in Mainland China’s social science landscape in the last four decades, while also noting some of the possible explanations for these changes, thereby deepening our understanding of social science research stemming from the region.

Fine-grained classification of social science journal articles using textual data: A comparison of supervised machine learning approaches

We compare two supervised machine learning algorithms—Multinomial Naïve Bayes and Gradient Boosting—to classify social science articles using textual data. The high level of granularity of the classification scheme used and the possibility that multiple categories are assigned to a document make this task challenging. To collect the training data, we query three discipline specific thesauri to retrieve articles corresponding to specialties in the classification. The resulting data set consists of 113,909 records and covers 245 specialties, aggregated into 31 subdisciplines from three disciplines. Experts were consulted to validate the thesauri-based classification. The resulting multilabel data set is used to train the machine learning algorithms in different configurations. We deploy a multilabel classifier chaining model, allowing for an arbitrary number of categories to be assigned to each document. The best results are obtained with Gradient Boosting. The approach does not rely on citation data. It can be applied in settings where such information is not available. We conclude that fine-grained text-based classification of social sciences publications at a subdisciplinary level is a hard task, for humans and machines alike. A combination of human expertise and machine learning is suggested as a way forward to improve the classification of social sciences documents.

Representation of Slovak Research Information (A Case Study)

In the light of the increasing importance of the societal impact of research, this article attempts to address the question as to how social sciences and humanities (SSH) research outputs from 2019 are represented in Slovak research portfolios in comparison with those of the EU-28 and the world. The data used for the analysis originate from the R&D SK CRIS and bibliographic Central Register of Publication Activities (CREPČ) national databases, and WoS Core Collection/InCites. The research data were appropriate for the analysis at the time they were structured, on the national level; of high quality and consistency; and covering as many components as possible and in mutual relations. The data resources should enable the research outputs to be assigned to research categories. The analysis prompts the conclusion that social sciences and humanities research outputs in Slovakia in 2019 are appropriately represented and in general show an increasing trend. This can be documented by the proportion represented by the SSH research projects and other entities involved in the overall Slovak research outputs, and even the higher ratio of SSH research publications in comparison with the EU-28 and the world. Recommendations of a technical character include research data management, data quality, and the integration of individual systems and available analytical tools.

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

Nowadays, the importance of bibliographic databases (DBs) has increased enormously, as they are the main providers of publication metadata and bibliometric indicators universally used both for research assessment practices and for performing daily tasks. Because the reliability of these tasks firstly depends on the data source, all users of the DBs should be able to choose the most suitable one. Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are the two main bibliographic DBs. The comprehensive evaluation of the DBs’ coverage is practically impossible without extensive bibliometric analyses or literature reviews, but most DBs users do not have bibliometric competence and/or are not willing to invest additional time for such evaluations. Apart from that, the convenience of the DB’s interface, performance, provided impact indicators and additional tools may also influence the users’ choice. The main goal of this work is to provide all of the potential users with an all-inclusive description of the two main bibliographic DBs by gathering the findings that are presented in the most recent literature and information provided by the owners of the DBs at one place. This overview should aid all stakeholders employing publication and citation data in selecting the most suitable DB.

Language Preferences in Romanian Communication Sciences Journals: A Web-Based Analysis

In modern times, English has become the lingua franca of science, dominating journal publishing ecologies. Multilingual journals keep up the flag, many researchers arguing that, especially in the case of social sciences and humanities, diversity of languages is an asset. In Romania, in the absence of national databases or repositories, the first task to understand linguistic preferences for scientific communication is to map the ground. The study extracted information on Romanian communication sciences journals from four major databases. Out of the 22 identified journals, only eight are dedicated solely to communication sciences, grouped in two poles of communication sciences schools, where doctoral studies in the field have been established. While English dominates the publication world, multilinguistic journals also appear, prevailing in traditional multicultural regions such as Transylvania–Banat. The future of multilingual journals depends on, among other factors, the capacity of the European Union to promote linguistic diversity for scientific purposes. Meanwhile, Romanian journals in communication sciences work towards increasing their impact. Research findings have practical and policy implications, the core idea being that Romanian editors need to strive for better standards in publication and showcase the journals better on the journal’s webpage.

Dynamic academic networking concept and its links with English language skills and research productivity-non-Anglophone context

Although the Science of Team Science or SciTS has already provided substantial evidence for research collaboration positive links to scientific productivity, much less is known about such links with broadly defined academic networking, especially with regard to the dilemma about forms of academic networking that may help individual scholars in handling risks and dynamics inherent in academic connections. This study uses cross-disciplinary theoretical insights to conceptualize “dynamic academic networking” as a distinct collaboration-related phenomenon that is theoretically linked with research productivity on the one hand, and with English language skills on the other, especially in the context of non-Anglophone academic systems. The study combines survey-based data and Scopus-based data to test two main hypothesized connections while controlling for the potential effects of other factors, e.g. home faculty research connections and faculty-industry professional connections. The research results provide support for the structural model which is also interpreted in terms of dynamic networking being valid concept in relation to further development of SciTS.

Mirror, mirror on the wall: is economics the fairest of them all? An investigation into the social sciences and humanities in Vietnam

Three major scientific policies implemented in 2008, 2014, and 2017 have pushed Vietnam’s social sciences and humanities (SSH) toward higher international standards. This study uses descriptive and Bayesian approaches on a dataset of 1,564 Vietnamese authors in the 2008–18 period to understand the changes under the new policies and the remaining challenges. The findings indicate that Economics is the most productive SSH field, with 858 publications in 11 years. Even though the number of authors has risen rapidly, gender disparity is still an issue. Economics has benefitted the most from Vietnam's development, and to a lesser extent, so have Education and Social Medicine. Future policies should aim to provide an enabling environment for female and early career researchers in every SSH field in Vietnam. The study calls for responsible usage of cross-discipline publication data to maintain a transparent source of information.

Open access at the national level: A comprehensive analysis of publications by Finnish researchers

Open access (OA) has mostly been studied by relying on publication data from selective international databases, notably Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The aim of our study is to show that it is possible to achieve a national estimate of the number and share of OA based on institutional publication data providing a comprehensive coverage of the peer-reviewed outputs across fields, publication types, and languages. Our data consists of 48,177 journal, conference, and book publications from 14 Finnish universities in 2016–2017, including information about OA status, as self-reported by researchers and validated by data-collection personnel through their Current Research Information System (CRIS). We investigate the WoS, Scopus, and DOI coverage, as well as the share of OA outputs between different fields, publication types, languages, OA mechanisms (gold, hybrid, and green), and OA information sources (DOAJ, Bielefeld list, and Sherpa/Romeo). We also estimate the role of the largest international commercial publishers compared to the not-for-profit Finnish national publishers of journals and books. We conclude that institutional data, integrated at national and international level, provides one of the building blocks of a large-scale data infrastructure needed for comprehensive assessment and monitoring of OA across countries, for example at the European level.

Multilingual publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A seven-country European study

We investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities (SSH) using a comprehensive data set of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Norway, Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages. We collected and analyzed a set of 164,218 peer-reviewed journal articles (produced by 51,063 researchers from 2013 to 2015) and found that multilingualism is prevalent despite geographical location and field. Among the researchers who published at least three journal articles during this time period, over one-third from the various countries had written their work in at least two languages. The highest share of researchers who published in only one language were from Flanders (80.9%), whereas the lowest shares were from Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%). Our findings show that multilingual publishing is an ongoing practice in many SSH research fields regardless of geographical location, political situation, and/or historical heritage. Here we argue that research is international, but multilingual publishing keeps locally relevant research alive with the added potential for creating impact.

National Lists of Scholarly Publication Channels: An Overview and Recommendations for Their Construction and Maintenance

Purpose

This paper presents an overview of different kinds of lists of scholarly publication channels and of experiences related to the construction and maintenance of national lists supporting performance-based research funding systems. It also contributes with a set of recommendations for the construction and maintenance of national lists of journals and book publishers.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on analysis of previously published studies, policy papers, and reported experiences related to the construction and use of lists of scholarly publication channels.

Findings

Several countries have systems for research funding and/or evaluation, that involve the use of national lists of scholarly publication channels (mainly journals and publishers). Typically, such lists are selective (do not include all scholarly or non-scholarly channels) and differentiated (distinguish between channels of different levels and quality). At the same time, most lists are embedded in a system that encompasses multiple or all disciplines. This raises the question how such lists can be organized and maintained to ensure that all relevant disciplines and all types of research are adequately represented.

Research limitation

The conclusions and recommendations of the study are based on the authors’ interpretation of a complex and sometimes controversial process with many different stakeholders involved.

Practical implications

The recommendations and the related background information provided in this paper enable mutual learning that may feed into improvements in the construction and maintenance of national and other lists of scholarly publication channels in any geographical context. This may foster a development of responsible evaluation practices.

Originality/value

This paper presents the first general overview and typology of different kinds of publication channel lists, provides insights on expert-based versus metrics-based evaluation, and formulates a set of recommendations for the responsible construction and maintenance of publication channel lists.

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres. This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling  scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies. They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

An Overview of the Dynamics of Relative Research Performance in Central-Eastern Europe Using a Ranking-Based Analysis Derived from SCImago Data

In recent times, rankings seem to play an increasingly important role, influencing the lives of individual researchers or academics and their institutions. Individual and institutional rankings used for promotion and research or academic funding seem to illustrate more and more the “publish or perish” mantra, relying sometimes almost exclusively on publications and their citations. Eastern Europe found itself part of this new world after a period of isolation, uneven for the countries within the area. The present study uses SCImago data to perform a regional analysis of individual and aggregated domains, for individual countries and the entire region, based on a novel “adjusted citation index”, in order to measure the performance and identify, using correlations with additional data and information, the mechanisms that can increase the research performance of a country. In a nutshell, the results indicate that the national research policies are responsible for performance. Adaptive research policies simulate a real performance, in comparison with more restrictive ones, which are more likely to stimulate unethical behaviors such as self-citations or citation stacking, especially when used for the assessment of researchers. The importance of the findings lies in the possibility of replicating the methodology, adapting it to different spatial scales.

Historical Bibliometrics Using Google Scholar: The Case of Roman Law, 1727–2016

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to investigate the historical and linguistic coverage of Google Scholar, using publications in the field of Roman law as an example.

Design/methodology/approach

To create a dataset of Roman law publications, we retrieved a total of 21,300 records of publications, published between years 1500 and 2016, with title including words denoting “Roman law” in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Findings

We were able to find publications dating back to 1727. The largest number of publications and authors date to the late 19th century, and this peak might be explained by the role of Roman law in French legal education at the time. Furthermore, we found exceptionally skewed concentration of publications to authors, as well as of citations to publications. We speculate that this could be explained by the long time-frame of the study, and the importance of classic works.

Research limitation

Major limitations, and potential future work, relate to data quality, and cleaning, disambiguation of publications and authors, as well as comparing coverage with other data sources.

Practical implications

We find Google Scholar to be a promising data source for historical bibliometrics. This approach may help bridge the gap between bibliometrics and the “digital humanities”.

Originality/value

Earlier studies have focused mainly on Google Scholar's coverage of publications and citations in general, or in specific fields. The historical coverage has, however, received less attention.

Fast growth of the number of proceedings papers in atypical fields in the Czech Republic is a likely consequence of the national performance-based research funding system

This article compares the growth rates of Web of Science indexed research publications in 11 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The growth of publication output in the Czech Republic was very fast: the annual production increased more than threefold. However, the number of articles increased only 2.6-fold, whereas the number of proceedings papers increased eightfold. During 2013–15 almost one-third of the papers published by researchers based in the Czech Republic were proceedings papers, a much higher share than in any other benchmark country. Such a high share is undesirable, because proceedings papers are generally much less often cited than journal articles. The growth of the number of proceedings papers is fastest in 17 fields belonging to the social sciences which usually do not hold proceedings papers in high regard. Our analysis shows that this undesirable development started after the introduction of national performance-based research funding system (PRFS) in the Czech Republic. Hence, the effort made to publish proceedings papers seems to reflect an optimization strategy in the light of the PRFS. In the Czech PRFS, proceedings papers have been rewarded point values similar to articles in refereed journals and a large portion of the institutional funding is allocated according to the evaluation results. As a consequence of very fast growth of proceedings papers in the social sciences, the university institutional funding in these fields has grown faster than in other fields. In conclusion, the fast growth of proceedings papers represents an adaptive behavior to the context of the PRFS.

Researchers publishing monographs are more productive and more local-oriented

In this study, we investigate what share of researchers publish monographs across fields, gender and seniority. We acquired data from the Polish current research information system (POL-on) containing metadata of about 1,031,141 peer-reviewed publications from 67,415 Polish researchers, including 30,185 monographs from 2013 to 2016. The data are aggregated at the researcher level, which allows us to shed new light on publication patterns in all fields. We show that scholars who publish monographs also publish journal articles at the same time. This pattern is observed in all dimensions, i.e. research fields, gender and seniority. However, substantial differences between the fields are observed. Moreover, we show that researchers who publish monographs are also more productive in terms of the number of publications than researchers who did not publish any monographs. This result is independent of the publication counting method, i.e. fractional or whole counting. At the same time, scholars who publish monographs are more local-oriented in terms of the publication channels they choose.

Intellectual and social similarity among scholarly journals: An exploratory comparison of the networks of editors, authors and co-citations

This paper explores, by using suitable quantitative techniques, to what extent the intellectual proximity among scholarly journals is also proximity in terms of social communities gathered around the journals. Three fields are considered: statistics, economics and information and library sciences. Co-citation networks represent intellectual proximity among journals. The academic communities around the journals are represented by considering the networks of journals generated by authors writing in more than one journal (interlocking authorship: IA), and the networks generated by scholars sitting on the editorial board of more than one journal (interlocking editorship: IE). Dissimilarity matrices are considered to compare the whole structure of the networks. The CC, IE, and IA networks appear to be correlated for the three fields. The strongest correlation is between CC and IA for the three fields. Lower and similar correlations are obtained for CC and IE, and for IE and IA. The CC, IE, and IA networks are then partitioned in communities. Information and library sciences is the field in which communities are more easily detectable, whereas the most difficult field is economics. The degrees of association among the detected communities show that they are not independent. For all the fields, the strongest association is between CC and IA networks; the minimum level of association is between IE and CC. Overall, these results indicate that intellectual proximity is also proximity among authors and among editors of the journals. Thus, the three maps of editorial power, intellectual proximity, and authors communities tell similar stories.

El prestigio de las editoriales académicas con libros en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades en Brasil

Resumen El libro es un importante medio de comunicación científica en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, es por ello por lo que se debe potenciar su correcta evaluación. Así, en el presente artículo se exponen las distintas metodologías de valoración de libros académicos que aplican las agencias de Brasil y de España y a continuación se ofrecen resultados de un estudio sobre el prestigio de las editoriales. El cuestionario por el que se han obtenido los datos fue enviado a 16.542 directores de grupos de investigación en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades y se recibieron 1.977 respuestas (12%). Los resultados son novedosos, ya que es la primera vez que se realiza un estudio de percepción de la calidad de las editoriales en Brasil, a partir de la opinión de los especialistas. Como ejemplo del trabajo realizado, se presentan las editoriales con mayor prestigio en Educación y, como en el resto de las áreas, hay un núcleo pequeño de editoriales brasileñas que son las que concentran más votos. En el caso de las editoriales extranjeras, el prestigio no está tan concentrado, siendo Portugal, Francia y España los países de procedencia de estas editoriales. Estos resultados pueden servir de forma orientativa en los procesos de evaluación de la actividad científica en Brasil. Además, los editores pueden tener conocimiento de cómo son percibidos y para los autores también es importante conocer esta información cuando tengan que elegir una editorial para presentar sus manuscritos.

Offene Wissenschaft braucht offene Infrastrukturen

Im Rahmen einer Europäischen Mutual Learning Exercise wurde der Wandel zu Open Science mit Schwerpunkt auf alternativen Metriken zur Vermessung und Bewertung, sowie neuen Anreizsystemen diskutiert. Der Artikel bereitet die Ergebnisse dieses Austausches im Lichte der Herausforderungen für offene Infrastrukturen auf. Es scheint jetzt der geeignete Zeitpunkt, Infrastrukturen im Hinblick auf deren sozio-technische Funktionen und Verantwortungen im öffentlich finanzierten Wissenschaftssystem neu zu bewerten und offen zu gestalten. Dies kann jedoch nur gelingen, wenn deren Architektur und Logik transparent gehalten werden, und das Wissen über deren Nutzungsweisen offenbleibt.