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

Abstract

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.

A Road Toward Greater Visibility of Research Output in International Peer-Review Journals: Lessons from Poland

“…However, in the CEE region, Poland and the Czech Republic were pioneers in international collaboration, number of articles published in foreign journals, citation impact, publication practices, and intensity of changes (Kozak, Bornmann, and Leydesdorff 2015). Recent studies have shown that publication patterns in political science and international relations in CEE countries have evolved toward publishing of articles in journals with greater citation impact, as indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus (Korytkowski and Kulczycki 2019; Kulczycki et al 2018; Petr et al 2021). Figure 1 confirms these changes.

Figure 1 Total Number of Published Articles in Political Science and International Relations (Scopus 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020) Source: Scimago Journal & Country Rank (2021).

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

“…As a consequence of the limitations enacted by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, it is more difficult to comprehensively index the humanities via citations, a condition that limited the use of quantitative bibliometric methods in this area [24], despite clear progress over recent time [25,26]. The lack of a comprehensive and reliable citation index remains a known and open problem in the humanities [27][28][29].…”

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

“…As a consequence of the limitations enacted by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, it is more difficult to comprehensively index the humanities via citations, a condition that limited the use of quantitative bibliometric methods in this area [23], despite clear progress over recent time [24,25]. The lack of a comprehensive and reliable citation index remains a known and open problem in the humanities [26][27][28].…”