Internationalization of Academic Journals: Is There Still a Gap between Social and Natural Sciences?

Abstract

In this study we compare internationalization of academic journals in six fields of science. Internationalization was investigated through journals' concentration on publishing papers from particular countries, relationship between the geographical distributions of editors and authors, and relationship between language of publication and the geographical distribution of papers. Having analyzed more than 1000 journals we can state that social sciences literature in the fields considered is still nationally and linguistically fragmented more than natural sciences literature, but in some cases the gap is not so big. One of the consequences concerning research output assessment is that usefulness of international databases having national disparity in coverage is still limited in social sciences.

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

“…However, in our study this is not the case in all disciplines (not in social sciences and engineering). Research in these disciplines still focuses on local problems (social sciences: Dyachenko, 2014;engineering: Kaltenbrunner, 2018), which also contributes to German academic identity construction, for example of the German engineer. Surprisingly, in our data we do not find evidence for internationalization in increasing co-authorship, which can be found in studies from other countries (e.g., Henriksen, 2016;Ossenblok et al, 2014;Sivertsen, 2016).…”

“…The acceptance of journal publication as the dominant reward principle has made the natural sciences the "model" (Cole, 1983) for other disciplines, for example also in the social science disciplines of business and economics (Annex 1). In adopting the natural science model, academics in humanities, social and other sciences are challenging disciplinary traditions of knowledge generation and distribution (e.g., Chi, 2015;Dyachenko, 2014;Haddow & Hammarfelt, 2019;Larivière & Sugimoto, 2019;Sivertsen, 2016). Altogether, the share of publications by humanities and social sciences scholars from non-English speaking countries has increased in general and in peer-reviewed journal publications in particular as, for example, the European cross-country comparison by Kulczycki et al (2018) shows.…”

Scientific collaboration analysis of Brazilian postgraduate programs in information science

“…Los estudios que utilizan WoS como fuente de información para el desarrollo de indicadores tienen un carácter más integral, con mayores dimensiones de análisis (Dyachenko, 2014;Milanez et al, 2014). Como ejemplo, los informes de actividad de la FAPESP, que en ocasiones presentan indicadores considerando países y áreas de investigación (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, 2018).…”

Fuentes de datos para la investigación de la delincuencia en España

“…La mayoría de la literatura criminológica es en inglés, y la mayoría de los estudios criminológicos proceden de Estados Unidos o, en menor grado, del Reino Unido o Australia (Dyachenko, 2014;Faraldo-Cabana y Lamela, 2021) 1 . Esto tiene un efecto en el nivel y la cultura de investigación en países no anglófonos, donde sin duda es más difícil para los investigadores tanto acceder a los conocimientos publicados como diseminar sus propios hallazgos empíricos.…”