Are book publications disappearing from scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities?

Abstract

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution in terms of shares of scholarly book publications in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in five European countries, i.e. Flanders (Belgium), Finland, Norway, Poland and Slovenia. In addition to aggregate results for the whole of the social sciences and the humanities, the authors focus on two well-established fields, namely, economics & business and history. Design/methodology/approach-Comprehensive coverage databases of SSH scholarly output have been set up in Flanders (VABB-SHW), Finland (VIRTA), Norway (NSI), Poland (PBN) and Slovenia (COBISS). These systems allow to trace the shares of monographs and book chapters among the total volume of scholarly publications in each of these countries. Findings-As expected, the shares of scholarly monographs and book chapters in the humanities and in the social sciences differ considerably between fields of science and between the five countries studied. In economics & business and in history, the results show similar field-based variations as well as country variations. Most year-to-year and overall variation is rather limited. The data presented illustrate that book publishing is not disappearing from an SSH. Research limitations/implications-The results presented in this paper illustrate that the polish scholarly evaluation system has influenced scholarly publication patterns considerably, while in the other countries the variations are manifested only slightly. The authors conclude that generalizations like "performance-based research funding systems (PRFS) are bad for book publishing" are flawed. Research evaluation systems need to take book publishing fully into account because of the crucial epistemic and social roles it serves in an SSH. Originality/value-The authors present data on monographs and book chapters from five comprehensive coverage databases in Europe and analyze the data in view of the debates regarding the perceived

Researchers publishing monographs are more productive and more local-oriented

“…Such studies can be conducted at the level of countries, fields, or research units. Engels et al (2018) show that scholarly book publications are not disappearing from scholarly communications, and that the publication patterns seem stable over the last several years. Kulczycki et al (2018) present publication patterns for eight European countries, and argue that monograph patterns differ both across fields and across countries within social sciences and humanities (SSH).…”

“…Comprehensive studies need to be based on national level publication databases that collect all scholarly output, as opposed to commercial bibliographic databases which collect only data on selected publications (Sīle et al 2018). In the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) and Scopus, the degree of coverage of scholarly books is low, especially where non-English outlets are not indexed (Kousha et al 2011;Leydesdorff and Felt 2012), while in national databases, scholarly book publications constitute a substantial share of the total volume (Engels et al 2018). Such studies can be conducted at the level of countries, fields, or research units.…”

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

“…More frequent use of national lists is reported in SSH fields than STEM, probably because other comprehensive metrics have been lacking (Aagaard et al, 2014;Aagaard, 2018;Krog Lind, 2019;Pölönen & Wahlfors, 2016;Sivertsen & Schneider 2012;Wahlfors & Pölönen, 2017). Norway and Finland have published guidelines for the responsible use of the publication channel-based indicators (Pölönen, 2018;Publication Forum, 2020;Sivertsen, 2018).…”

“…As the recent evaluation of the Norwegian publication indicator suggests, increasing transparency can increase legitimacy of the model (Aagaard et al, 2014). To address this issue, the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions implemented a solution making the procedure and groups for expert-panel decisions more transparent in an internet portal open to all researchers: https://npi.nsd.no/ (Sivertsen, 2018). Similar portal has been developed also in Finland, where all the information supporting the panel evaluation is also available for the researchers: http://jfp.csc.fi:8080/en/ (Pölönen, 2018).…”

The Flemish Performance-based Research Funding System: A Unique Variant of the Norwegian Model

“…The Flemish Performance-based Research Funding System: A Unique Variant of the Norwegian Model http://www.jdis.org https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jdis internationalization of book publishing (Verleysen & Engels, 2014a, 2014b, the role of book publications in History (Verleysen & Engels, 2012), and concentration of academic book publishers (Guns, 2018). Finally, given the prevalence of similar national databases across Europe (Sīle et al,, 2017;Sīle et al, 2018), many possibilities have opened in the last few years for international comparison (Engels et al, 2018;Giménez-Toledo et al, 2016;Kulczycki, Engels, & Nowotniak, 2017;Kulczycki et al, 2018;Ossenblok, Engels, & Sivertsen, 2012;Pölönen et al, 2018;. ECOOM-Antwerp has also setup an online overview of national bibliographic databases for the SSH at https://ecoom.…”