Journal article publishing in the social sciences and humanities: a comparison of Web of Science coverage for five European countries
Michal Petr, Tim C.E. Engels, Emanuel Kulczycki, Marta Duskova, Raf Guns, Monika Sieberova, Gunnar Sivertsen
11 Coverage of journal articles in social sciences and humanities in Web of Science and their representation in citation indexes: a comparison of five European countries
Michal Petr , Tim C.E. Engels , Emanuel Kulczycki , Marta Dušková , Raf Guns , Monika Sieberová , Gunnar Sivertsen [email protected], [email protected] Research Office, Masaryk University, Zerotinovo namesti 1, 60177 Brno (Czech Republic) [email protected], [email protected] Centre for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp, Middelheimlaan 1, Antwerp, 2020 (Belgium)
Scholarly Communication Research Group, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Szamarzewskiego 69, Poznań, 60-568 (Poland) [email protected] Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information, Lamačská cesta 8/A, 811 04 Bratislava (Slovak Republic) [email protected] Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, P.O. Box 2815, Oslo, 0608 Toyen (Norway) *[email protected]
Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to expand the knowledge on publication patterns in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in terms of the coverage of journal articles in Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) and their distribution in citation indexes. Within Journal Citation Reports (JCR), we focus deeper on quartile ranks based on the Journal Impact Factor. We analyse 441,088 publications over the years 2013–2016 from five European countries with focus on the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and, especially on the Czech Republic. With this study, we aim to follow-up a discussion of publication patterns in SSH by providing complex data on recent developments primarily in CEE countries with similar cultural and political heritage (Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland) and comparing the patterns with Flanders (Belgium) and Norway representing Western and Nordic countries. Our findings show that despite a persisting distinction between the group of CEE countries and two Western/Nordic countries across all disciplines, CEE countries approach Western and Nordic counterparts in observed dimensions. Overall, the publication patterns in particular in CEE countries advance into a greater representation in journals indexed in WoS and within WoS into those of greater influence (Q1+Q2). Nonetheless, there are some substantial dissimilarities in the dynamics of this progress between countries and disciplines even within a specific subject area such as Social Sciences and Humanities. We conclude with the suggestion to take the differences between disciplines within SSH into account for research evaluation and science policy.
Keywords : Coverage, Publication patterns, Social sciences, Humanities, National databases, Web of Science
Declarations Funding:
The work was supported by the COST Action CA15137 “European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” (ENRESSH) through an STSM grant to Michal Petr. The work of Raf Guns and T.C.E.Engels was supported by the Flemish Government through its funding of the Flemish Centre for Research & Development Monitoring (ECOOM).
Conflict of Interest:
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Author contributions:
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors created the datasets. Analysis was performed by Michal Petr and Monika Sieberová. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Michal Petr and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Acknowledgements : The authors are indebted to COST Action CA1537 “European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities” for supporting this work. The authors wish to thank Clarivate Analytics for providing the list of journals related to citation indexes in the Core Collection.
Introduction
This study aims to expand our knowledge about the publication patterns in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, which is still a neglected region in terms of bibliometric research. Although some research encompassing several CEE countries was conducted in the past, the overall situation in this region regarding SSH outcome dynamics has not been fully grasped. A recent comparative study of eight European countries (Kulczycki et al. 2018) showed the changes and differences in publication patterns in terms of the proportion of publication types and publication languages across European countries and disciplines. The study argued that these differences are often due to the countries’ cultural and historical background. Similarly, Kozak et al. (2015) concluded that from the perspective of international collaboration, number of articles, and citation impact, the publication practices and the intensity of their change differ between Eastern European post-communist states, with the number of articles increasing the most in the Czech Republic and Poland. The evaluation systems in the Czech Republic (Good et al. 2015) and in Poland (Korytkowski and Kulczycki 2019 ) favour journal articles indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus over books and other types of outputs. However, SSH researchers in the Czech Republic still commonly believe that publishing in WoS journals can be at times too challenging due to many issues; whether real or perceived, these issues include research limited to topics of local relevance, language barriers, and lack of journals in their field (Linková 2014; Šima 2017). Some researchers in other CEE countries hold similar opinions (Kulczycki et al. 2019; Pajić 2014), And the local vs international dilemma obviously applies to journals’ publishing strategies as well (Skovajsa 2014; Toth 2018). Several questions then emerge: is the common mindset among CEE researchers defensible from the point of view of recent publication patterns in SSH in other countries? Furthermore, is the journal-level indicator suitable for studying the dynamics of SSH publication output or even for evaluating these disciplines at the national level? Jurajda et al. (2017) analysed the performance of SSH disciplines in post-communist countries through the journal-level indicator and concluded that the performance in these countries remains behind their Western counterparts. A few years before, Vanecek (2014) reached a similar conclusion by finding out that based on the average impact factor (IF) of journals in all disciplines, there had been no change in quality of publications of Czech authors. With this study, we aim to investigate if the changes and differences in the publication patterns showed above also affect the coverage of SSH articles in WoS and, within WoS, the proportion of articles in journals ranked in the first two quartiles in the ranking by the Journal Impact Factor (IF) in a subject category. This paper deals with the following two research questions: RQ1: Have publication patterns in SSH in CEE countries changed in favour of WoS-indexed articles? RQ2: Have the publication patterns changed in favour of articles in journals ranked in Q1 and Q2 in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) according to IF? For both research questions, we concurrently ask if there is a difference between disciplines in both dimensions. Several previous studies looked at the coverage of social sciences and humanities in major international databases (Engels et al. 2012; Ossenblok et al. 2012; Sivertsen and Larsen 2012; Sivertsen 2014), but those tackled only Nordic or Western countries. We decided to focus on the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland as countries representing CEE because of their similar cultural and political heritage, and then we compared the resulting patterns with the region of Flanders (Belgium) and Norway, which in the study represent Western and Nordic countries. The previously mentioned studies by Kozak et al. (2015) and Jurajda (2017) were limited in their scope, as they used WoS content only. As a result, we analysed the publication output reported in national databases for all disciplines in SSH. Furthermore, we also looked into the share of journal articles among all peer-reviewed publications registered in national bibliographic databases to obtain a much broader picture. A full coverage of scholarly publication channels in the WoS is virtually impossible in SSH disciplines. The variety of publication patterns, channels, and publication types is much more heterogeneous in SSH than in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM). Even though Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) started to index more journals in national languages in 2006, its coverage of SSH publications is still limited (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2015; Ossenblok et al. 2012). As a specific feature extending the citations tracking within the Web of Science Core Collection, the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) was established in 2015 with a 10-year backfile, covering 7,743 journals as of October 2018. Among others, ESCI supplies the Core Collection with many SSH journals in local languages. The mission of Clarivate Analytics is to maintain a selection process guaranteeing the quality threshold equivalent to journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and in Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). As a result, ESCI journals are included in the coverage analysis together with JCR- and AHCI-indexed journals. In this study, we consider IF to be an indication of journals’ citation impact. Within this rationale, we consider the quartile rank of journals in JCR to be an indication of journals’ demandingness and prestige. Thus, more prestigious are those ranked higher (Q1 and Q2). It is not the aim of this paper to argue whether IF is an appropriate indicator for evaluating research or not. At the same time, we do not primarily aim to claim a qualitative distinction between WoS-indexed and non-WoS-indexed journals. While evaluation mechanisms across Europe are diverse (Ochsner et al. 2018), the point is that some evaluation systems see (and reward) the publication performance through bibliometric indicator. In Poland, journals with IF are weighted more in Polish Journal Ranking, which is a key element of national Performance-based Research Funding System (PRFS) (Kulczycki and Rozkosz 2017). In the past, Czech PRFS used a formula comprising journal rank according to IF for calculating publication points. Since 2017, however, the number and proportion of articles in each quartile in journal ranking according to the Article Influence Score (AIS) is used as one of five modules in the Czech Republic’s PRFS for assessing the publication performance of each research field (Office of the Government of the Czech Republic 2018). Based on our experiences, a similar mechanism is at play in Slovakia, although no dedicated literature on the research evaluation and its effects seems to exist. Consequently, for many researchers the journals with IF could play the main role when considering what is valued in the national evaluation (Skovajsa 2014). Vanholsbeeck at al. (2019) showed that these external incentives are also observed across Europe–researchers often deal with quality requirements by balancing (perceived) publishing priorities and their own research interests but are still very critical of the definition of quality in these requirements. Therefore, revealing publication patterns of the coverage and ranking of journals in international comparison may help us understand better the variance of publication patterns in SSH, which in turn needs to be considered especially in science policies when using bibliometrics. A publication in a WoS-indexed journal is in most SSH disciplines still seen as a success of its kind and also as an indication of higher quality in publication profile (Sivertsen 2016). If this is true, then the ranking of journals might play a role in this process. Data and methods
This study uses the data about peer-reviewed publications from the years 2013 to 2016 that were acquired from the national databases in the Czech Republic (RIV), Poland (PBN), Slovakia (CREPČ), Flanders (VABB-SHW), and Norway (NSI). The need to use national databases as an essential data sources for SSH as well as the methodology of the data collection, definitions of publication types, and inclusion criteria in various countries has been described mainly by Kulczycki et al. (2018), Sīle et al. (2017), Sīle et al. (2018). A few important points must be made before we can proceed. In the case of Flanders, the database VABB-SHW covers the Flemish region, not the whole country. As for Slovakia and Flanders, we work with a 3-year window due to the year 2013 missing in the former and 2016 in the latter (Table 1). We use the data about peer-reviewed publications collected from national databases. For the purposes of this study, we use only data classified in three publications types: 1) journal articles, 2) monographs and edited books, and 3) book chapters and conference proceedings. The details on each database and publication types were published in ENRESSH report “European databases and repositories for Social Sciences and Humanities research output” ( Sīle et al. 2017). Publications are counted in full counting with the same weight to all publication types and affiliated countries. Discipline classification of publications was adopted from the databases in the OECD second-level classification scheme (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2015). Unfortunately, some of the disciplines in the Slovak national database CREPČ are defined too broadly; thus, it could have been linked only to
Other social sciences or Other Humanities , respectively. Therefore, we work with Slovak data on the level of the whole domains
Social Sciences and
Humanities . Due to massive differences in the extent and scope of associated articles, the disciplines
Other social sciences and
Other Humanities seem incomparable across countries (Table 1). However, all disciplines are counted in the overview at the level of whole domain (Social Sciences or Humanities).
Table 1. The total volume of all types of publications in SSH disciplines in national databases.
CZE (RIV) SLO (CREPČ) POL (PBN) NOR (NSI) FLA (VABB_SHW)
Psychology 2099 n/a 7539 2625 1820 Economics and business 6770 13973 73119 4105 1882 Educational sciences 8260 7004 19285 4037 771 Sociology 3345 n/a 12807 2155 1345 Law 6617 5659 36479 1820 3075 Political science 11389 n/a 14868 2198 851 Social and economic geography 518 n/a n/a 1754 639 Media and communications 917 n/a 3604 875 533 Other social sciences 1262 5737 7960 2808 230 History and archaeology 10786 2137 26190 2120 1048 Languages and literature 7690 n/a 47258 3175 2210 Philosophy, ethics, and religion 3981 n/a 17381 2309 1432 Arts 5662 479 5449 1090 692 Other humanities 16 11306 5099 734 110 All 69312 46295 277038 31805 15811 Period 2013–2016 2014–2016 2013–2016 2013–2016 2013–2015 CZE Czech Republic, SLO Slovakia, POL Poland, NOR Norway, FLA Flanders We have aggregated the data in two levels: Level 1: all peer-reviewed publications. To analyse the share of the articles, we used the total counts of all peer-reviewed articles in journals, monographs and edited books, chapters and conference proceedings collected from national databases totalling at 441,088 publications. Level 2: journal articles. To analyse the coverage and to associate the articles with the information about journal indexation, we used the full list of journal articles with the basic bibliographic information, Frascati Field of Research and Development classification (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2015) and digital identifiers (UT WoS, DOI) from every country under analysis, which comes at 190,814 articles. For this study, Clarivate Analytics provided lists of journals covered by WoS in the 2013–2016 period with information about journals’ indexation in WoS citation indexes (SCI-E, SSCI, AHCI and ESCI) in every year in the period. Foremost, we cleaned the data about journals in order to have just one index assigned to the journal. In some cases, the journal was associated with more than one citation index in Clarivates’ data. Therefore, we used the following decision strategy for linking the journals with the citation index. We gave a priority to indexes SCI-E and SSCI (those indexed in JCR), and if the journal was not in JCR, we searched the journal in AHCI and then in ESCI. As the second step, we assigned the quartile rank (Q1–Q4) to journals indexed in JCR. For this purpose, we worked with the quartile rank valid in the year of issue. In case of multiple subject categories assigned, we decided to use the best performing quartile rank. Finally, we matched the information about the indexation of journals with the list of articles comprising the journals’ ISSN, e-ISSN, Title, and article-level identification (doi, UT WoS). By combining the article-level identification and journal-level indexation, we were able to decide which journals in the list of articles from national databases are indexed in the respective year of issue. We considered all articles published in a given year as covered if a journal was present in any citation index in the Web of Science in a respective year. 5.7 % of all WoS-indexed articles from national databases were assigned to Book Citation Indexes (BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH), Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes (CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH), and category “n/a”, which stands for WoS-indexed articles in journals indexed in SCI-E or SSCI but without impact factor assigned in a given year. For some purposes (e.g. Figures 5–6), we merged these articles into category “other” (BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, “n/a”). We conducted the following analyses to answer the research questions. First, we determined the share of journal articles . By the “share of articles”, we refer to a percentage of peer-reviewed journal articles of the total number of all peer-reviewed SSH publications (articles, books, book chapters, proceedings) registered in national databases. This relates only to the pattern in the proportion of publication types regardless the indexation in any international database. Second, we determined a percentage of SSH journal articles indexed in WoS of all articles registered in the national database (“ coverage ”). Third, we calculated the proportions of SSH journal articles in citation indexes assigned to the source journals within Web of Science. For those included in Journal Citation Reports, we further distinguished four quartiles derived from the subject category ranking by the impact factor. Within this context, we focus on showing the percentage of articles in Q1 and Q2 journals . We assume that in the case of the Social Sciences and Humanities the first two quartiles of the JCR ranking represent good performance and prestige. In the characteristics of individual disciplines, we avoided describing those where the total number of WoS-indexed articles per year does not reach at least 50 articles, because the analysis of the coverage and consequent finer-grained differentiation of citation databases within WoS does not seem justified for such small units. In the Czech Republic, these “small” fields are
Law, Social and economic geography, Media and communications . In Poland:
Social and economic geography, Media and communications, Arts . In Slovakia, due to the differences in classification and the low coverage, we were only able to analyse fields
Economics and business, Educational sciences and
History and Archaeology . In Norway and Flanders, there were no fields with fewer than 50 articles per year. Since the primary goal was to look at the situation in CEE countries, we did not separately describe these disciplines in Norway and Flanders even when they were above the threshold.
Results
The results of the two aggregated groups of Social Sciences and Humanities are available in the following forms: as the overall share of journal articles in the total number of peer-reviewed publications, as their coverage by Web of Science , and as their distribution in citation indexes. As a follow-up, the individual disciplines are described separately. The overall share of journal articles
Flanders and Norway have a higher share of journal articles than the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia in both the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Figure 1 shows that in Social Sciences, the share in CEE countries does not exceed 50%, while Flanders has a rather stable share of over 70% and Norway over 60%. The share of articles is on the rise in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Norway and is relatively stable in Flanders. Poland is the only country where the share of journal articles is decreasing after a significant gain in 2013 (Kulczycki et al 2018). Looking at individual disciplines in Social Sciences (see Table 2), there is a substantial difference between CEE countries on the one hand and Flanders and Norway on the other. The share of journal articles is often higher in Flanders than in CEE countries, and among them, the Czech Republic usually has the highest share except in
Psychology and in
Economics and business . In Humanities (see Figure 2), fluctuations seem somewhat larger than in Social Sciences. The overall share of journal articles is lower than in Social Sciences, and the overall differences between countries seem less pronounced. We observe differences between disciplines rather than differences between countries. Only in Poland, in nearly all fields, the number of articles as well as the share of articles is stable or one the decline.
Figure 1. The share of journal articles in Social Sciences.
Figure 2. The share of journal articles in Humanities.
The coverage of journal articles in WoS
Figures 3–4 show the developments in the coverage of SSH articles in WoS in the period 2013–2016 for Social Sciences and for Humanities, respectively. In Social Sciences (Figure 3), the Czech Republic and Slovakia exhibit a slight increase of the percentage of WoS-covered articles, albeit the absolute value is much lower than in Norway and Flanders. The coverage of Czech articles in Social Sciences increased in the 2013–2016 period from 17.7% to 26%, in Slovakia from 10.7% to 17.9%, in Poland from 7.2% to 10.8% and from 60.3% to 64.4% in Flanders. In Norway, the proportion of articles in WoS-covered journals is fairly stable, around 65%. In Humanities (Figure 4), the coverage is generally lower, and the changes are happening slowly. The fluctuations are more apparent than in Social Sciences (Table 6 and 7).
Figure 3. The coverage of journal articles in WoS – Social Sciences.
Figure 4. The coverage of journal articles in WoS – Humanities.
The distribution of journal articles in citation indexes in WoS
This section details distribution of journal articles in citation indexes within WoS. Figures 7-8 show the percentage of articles in Q1+Q2 journals in WoS. Nevertheless, one must bear in mind that journals with IF and in particular percentage of articles in top-tier journals alone do not represent prestige or performance, which is especially true in Humanities. To identify the extent to which SSH in each country publish in journals in each citation index, Figures 5 and 6 refer to the overall proportion of citation indexes in each country for all the years of the analysis and are divided into: 1) JCR-indexed journals (with IF) – Q1+Q2; 2) JCR-indexed journals (with IF) – Q3+Q4; 3) AHCI; 4) ESCI; 5) other (BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, “n/a”). Figure 6 shows that due to the large extent of using non-IF AHCI journals, we should reflect AHCI when interpreting the possible indicators of prestige or influence in Humanities. In addition, Figures 12–21 (Supplementary data) show the distribution of journal articles in citation indexes separated by country. Finally, we show the data for each discipline from all countries in Table 8 (Supplementary data).
Figure 5. Proportion of articles in WoS citation indexes: Social Sciences.
Figure 6. Proportion of articles in WoS citation indexes: Humanities.
0 In Social Sciences, the analysis displays similar characteristics across more disciplines for a given country. In the Czech Republic, not only is there an increase of journal articles with IF, but also the share of articles in ESCI-indexed journals is on the rise as well. In contrast, the proportion of articles in journals in Q3 and Q4 is on its decline. Overall, Figure 5 shows that the proportion of Q1 and Q2 in Social Sciences grew up to 24.1% in 2016, whereas the share of articles in other JCR-indexed journals (Q3+Q4) declined (Table 2). This trend applies for most individual disciplines in Social Sciences in the Czech data (Supplementary data, Table 4). A similar trend is to be observed in Social Sciences in Poland, Norway, and Flanders (Table 2). The data from Norway indicate rather a stable trend throughout the observed period. The proportion of journals with IF overall and within them in Q1 and Q2 is, nonetheless, much higher in Flanders and Norway than in CEE countries. Slovakia stands out somewhat from the rest, as the usage of less influential journals (Q3 and Q4) decreased in favour of the substantial increase of other journals (ESCI from 32.8% in 2014 to 49.7% in 2016) and a slight increase of Q1 and Q2 journals (Table 2). The share of publications in ESCI-indexed journals is nonetheless increasing in all countries except Poland (Supplementary data, Figures 12-16).
Figure 7. The share of articles in Q1+Q2 journals in WoS – Social Sciences. Table 2. Distribution of articles in citation indexes within WoS - Social Sciences year JCR Q1+Q2 JCR Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other
CZE POL
Articles from Humanities show a different distribution pattern in particular citation indexes than Social Sciences, and there are more similarities across disciplines in Humanities than in Social Sciences. In this respect, differences between countries are not so noticeable. A significant percentage of articles is in Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index. Figure 6 further illustrates that publications in AHCI are particularly important for Humanities in the Czech Republic, Norway, and Flanders (Table 3), whereas ESCI prevails in Poland. Therefore, besides Figure 6 showing the share of influential journals concerning the research questions, we depict the proportion of all citation indexes in all countries fully in Figures 17-21 (Supplementary data). However, the share of ESCI-indexed articles is growing, and AHCI-indexed articles is declining between the total number of articles in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, albeit the overall share of articles with IF increased in all countries (Supplementary data, Figures 17-21). Any evolutions in the distribution are rather moderate. Slovakia has the lowest share of journal articles with IF (8.9% in 2016), whereas the share of articles in other journals, mostly indexed in ESCI, dominates (about 90%, Table 3). Norway is rather stable with some progress towards more articles with IF journals and more ESCI-indexed articles (Supplementary data, Figure 20). In all countries except Slovakia, the proportion of articles in Q1+Q2 journals increased in the period under observation (Figure 6). A similar growing trend in Q1+Q2 category is in Poland (13.5% in 2016) and Flanders (20.1% in 2015). 2
Figure 8. The share of articles in Q1+Q2 journals in WoS: Humanities.
Table 3. Distribution of articles in citation indexes within WoS - Humanities year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other
CZE Regional-based journals in the Chech Republic, Slovakia and Poland
Since it was possible that the coverage increased because of the addition of new regional-based journals (Engels et al. 2012), we analysed their proportion in each CEE country at the level of Social Sciences and Humanities. By the term “regional-based” we mean journal article in the national database published in the same country. For Czech and Slovak journal articles we count both Czech and Slovak journals due to the similarity of both languages and shared history. In the Czech Republic, Figure 9 shows that although the coverage increased both in Social Sciences and Humanities, the share of articles in regional-based journals decreased, even though five journals had been recently added (those with more than 10 articles in the year-range) to WoS during the observed period. A similar trend can be observed in Slovakia (Figure 10), while Poland is the only country where the share of articles in regional-based journals remain stable in Social Sciences (Figure 11). In this case, there are eight newly-indexed Polish journals with the 4.3% share of all WoS-indexed articles. In Humanities, the share of articles in Polish journals decreased.
Figure 9. WoS coverage and share of regional-based journals in the Czech Republic. Figure 10. WoS coverage and share of regional-based journals in Slovakia.
Figure 11. WoS coverage and share of regional-based journals in Poland.
The characteristics of SSH disciplines
Psychology
Psychology is a discipline with a traditionally high representation of journal articles among other types of peer-reviewed publications and with a high coverage in Web of Science (see Supplementary data Table 4 and 6). In Norway and Flanders, the share remains stable, which is also true of the coverage. The share of articles is also stable in Poland (59.3% in 2016) and rises in the Czech Republic up to 54.9% in 2016. For both the Czech Republic and Poland,
Psychology has the largest share of articles and coverage in WoS among all SSH disciplines. In the Czech Republic,
Psychology has the highest percentage of articles covered in WoS (46.7% in 2016) related to the most dynamic change in the share of articles in higher ranked journals (Q1+Q2 from 34.1% in 2013 to 42.3% in 2016). Another significant increase of Q1+Q2 articles is observed in Poland as well (from 35.8% in 2013 to 50.5% in 2016). Remarkably, Poland’s share of articles in
Psychology (and in
Economics and business ) is higher than that of the Czech Republic (59.3%), and
Psychology is also the only discipline where the coverage of journal articles from Poland in WoS exceeds 10% (46.2%). Overall, in all countries analysed, the proportion of Q1+Q2 journals rose and at the same time, the proportion of journals in Q3+Q4 decreased in favour of ESCI journals.
Economics and business
The share of articles in the publication records of all countries remains relatively stable over time. In Flanders and Norway, the share of journal articles in the dataset is about 70-80%, while in Poland it is 54.8%, and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia it is roughly 30-40%. Nevertheless, the percentage of WoS-covered economic articles is the highest among all disciplines (46.8% in 2016) in the Czech Republic and rises steadily as well as the proportion of articles in Q1+Q2 journals and ESCI-indexed articles (Supplementary data, Table 8). A similar pattern in the coverage and similar qualitative profile also applies for Slovakia. The
5 growth in coverage and the proportion of articles in higher ranked journals (Q1+Q2) is not observed for Norway and Flanders.
Educational Sciences
The share of articles slightly increased in Norway, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, albeit the overall share is one of the lowest among all disciplines in all countries in the Social Sciences. The coverage of articles assigned to
Educational Sciences is one of the lowest in all CEE countries and Norway: in the Czech Republic they comprised 12.6% WoS-indexed articles in 2016, while in Poland 6.1% and in Slovakia it was 17.3% as of 2016. Even though the proportion of articles in the first half of the journal ranking (Q1+Q2) is rising, it is still the lowest in the Czech Republic in Social Sciences (up to 18.1% in 2016). This is substantially lower than in Poland (rising to 26.3% in 2016), while in Slovakia the share of Q1+Q2 articles is declining in favour of ESCI-indexed articles (Supplementary data, Table 8). It should be also noted that Norway is close to CEE countries in terms of the share
Educational Sciences comprised of the total number of WoS-indexed articles (21.2% in 2016 and fluctuating).
Sociology
In Sociology, the share of articles in Norway and the Czech Republic slightly grows, but the coverage is rather stable in all countries except Flanders. The share of articles is one of the highest among all disciplines in the Czech Republic and approximately at the same level as in Flanders. The pattern occurring from cross-country comparison is similar across more disciplines in Social Sciences; the coverage in Norway (63.2% in 2016) and Flanders (77.4% in 2015) is proportionally higher than in the Czech Republic (growing up to 34.2% in 2016) or in Poland (10.6% in 2016 and stable over time). For the two CEE countries, the proportion of articles in Q1+Q2 journals underwent a minor change in the 2013–2016 period
Law
The share of articles in Czech data is relatively high (46.8% in 2016) in comparison with Norway (40% in 2016), Poland (30.8% in 2016) and Slovakia (21.6% in 2016). On the contrary,
Law has the lowest WoS coverage (3.8% in 2016) among all disciplines in the Czech Republic, and the actual number of WoS-covered articles per year in other countries is not high enough for the analysis of trends (Table 4).
Political science
The differences in the share of journal articles seem less pronounced between countries than in other disciplines. A share of articles is in the Czech Republic on the rise (47% in 2016) and approaching the percentage in Norway. The share is quite stable in Norway and Poland and increasing in Flanders and the Czech Republic. The pattern in the coverage, again, is similar to other disciplines; the percentage is significantly higher in Norway (76% in 2016) and Flanders (65.8% in 2017) than in the Czech Republic (27.2% in 2016) and Poland (4.7% in 2016). Trends seem to be related to each other in each country. The stable trend is observed in the proportion of Q1+Q2 journals in Norway and an increasing trend in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Flanders.
Social and economic geography Social and economic geography as a discipline is fairly young in the Czech Republic and shows strong interdisciplinarity with psychology, sociology, education, etc. From historical point of view, the focus was on the production of books with a marginal share of articles. This development corresponds with the stable and lower share of articles (about 34.8% in 2016) in the Czech Republic, whereas the share of articles is on the rise in Flanders (92.5% in 2015) and 6 stable in Norway (65.5% in 2016). The increasing focus on sources of greater visibility in the Czech Republic is indicated by increased coverage of articles in WoS (from 11.1% in 2013 to 35.4% in 2016), yet the overall number of articles is small (Table 4). We do not describe other dimensions due to the missing data from Poland and Slovakia.
Media and communications Media and communications is the only discipline where the share of articles in the Czech Republic declined from 2013 to 2016. Nevertheless, it also dropped in Poland and Norway, which is striking as these countries generally resemble one another in terms of the share of journal articles. Overall, however, the number of WoS-covered articles is too small to conduct further analyses.
History and archaeology, Languages and literature, Arts
The results display similarities across more disciplines in Humanities than in Social Sciences. At the same time, the patterns across countries in these disciplines differ in the same way. The coverage in CEE countries is approximately on an equal level, and the trends are quite stable over the period 2013–2016. The coverage in CEE countries is usually very low (never reaches 20%) and among CEE countries, the Czech Republic always displays slightly higher coverage than Poland. Any changes are almost invisible. In Norway and Flanders, however, the coverage exhibits more dynamic changes, e.g. in
Arts , the coverage in Norway grew from 34.4% in 2013 to 51.6% in 2016. Fluctuations are larger in the share of articles as well. While it is true that differences between countries in the share of articles are not as obvious as in Social Sciences, Flanders in
History and archaeology and Norway in
Art have significantly higher share of articles than other countries. A common trend in Poland across all Humanities is the decline in the share of journal articles. As for the proportion of articles in particular citation indexes, with the exceptions of very few (Arts in Norway), the share of JCR-indexed articles rises, which is most obvious in Flanders.
Philosophy, Ethics, and Religion Philosophy, Ethics, and Religion within Humanities to a degree stands apart from the patterns mentioned above as all countries have one in common. The share of articles is roughly on the same level across all countries, though the share in Poland declines. As for the Czech Republic, the share of articles is one of the highest among all Social Sciences and Humanities, and the percentage of WoS covered articles from the Czech Republic (34.2% in 2016) is stable and roughly on the same level as in Norway (38% in 2016). Despite the decline in the share of articles in Poland, the coverage in WoS still grows slightly. The proportion of articles in prestigious journals in WoS (Q1 and Q2) slightly grows to the detriment of articles in ESCI and AHCI journals in each of the five countries in the study.
Discussion
This study deepens the current understanding about the changes in the WoS coverage and the use of influential journals in SSH that occurred in three CEE countries, while also focusing on journal articles as a means of communicating scientific results in SSH. Our objectives were to identify possible trends towards greater coverage in WoS and towards more prestigious articles (Q1 and Q2 in the ranking by the Impact Factor) in those articles already covered in WoS. Kulczycki et al. (2018) concluded that the publication patterns in CEE countries in the 2011–2014 period display considerable changes in terms of the proportion of publication types. Our 7 current findings for the period 2013–2016 show that the share of articles in Social Sciences rose in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Norway while also being stable in Flanders; however, the coverage decreased in Poland, though the changes in Social Sciences are rather modest. In Humanities, the changes seem somewhat larger, which points at the differences between these two broad fields. Except for
Philosophy, ethics, and religion, where the share of articles is roughly equal across all analysed countries, there is still a striking distinction between the CEE countries and the Western/Nordic countries across all disciplines in all dimensions analysed in this paper. That being said, the difference is proportionally smaller than in previous years. The current situation in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia shows that the amount of articles indexed in Web of Science has clearly increased, and this is also true of higher representation of articles in influential journals, though the percentages do not reach those of Flanders and Norway. In Flanders, the rapid increase of WoS-indexed journals has been described for the earlier period by Engels et al. (2012) and Ossenblok et al. (2012). The prevalent characteristics for the vast majority of disciplines in Social Sciences and Humanities is the increase of the coverage in most countries. This is quite likely due to the addition of new journals, which is especially true in non-English-speaking countries. In this respect, Engels et al. (2012) showed on the examples of Flanders and Norway that adding a few journals could lead to a substantial difference in terms of WoS coverage for some of the analyzed disciplines. Regarding the countries in this research, we hypothesize that PRFS could influence journal policy by adding regional-based journals into WoS in order to benefit from favourable publishing conditions for national authors. Macháček and Srholec (2017) studied the representation of local journals in Scopus for several European countries. They defined a local journal as every journal with at least 33% share of domestic authors. As a result, there is a considerably higher number of local journals in Scopus published in CEE countries than in Western counterparts. In the Czech Republic, this lead to the same threshold whether it was set at 10 %, 33 %, or 66 % of domestic authors. Although their research was conducted for Scopus-based journals, the results indicate specific journal policies likely stimulated by local PRFS. In contrast to Macháček and Srholec, we did not carry out an analysis of comparable quality and granularity for WoS; similarly, we did not study the addition of new journals at the level of disciplines. However, results of our simple comparison of the coverage and share of articles in regional-based journals (Figures 9–11) at the lever of two research areas (Social Sciences and Humanities) show that this share decreases even though the coverage increased. Therefore, the influence of publishing in regional-based journals may not be too significant. The results show that the dynamics of changes in the share of articles among all peer-reviewed publications, in the coverage of articles, and the prestige of the journals used differ across disciplines. Although there are differences in absolute values between the countries analysed, most often the percentage of WoS covered articles increased, more visibly in the Czech Republic rather than in Poland and Slovakia (in
Psychology, Economics and business, Sociology, Political Sciences ). In
Educational Sciences and all fields in Humanities, the coverage of articles from CEE countries remain rather stable over the years. The publication patterns seem more firmly anchored in Humanities as the developments in the coverage are modest across all CEE countries, but surprisingly larger in Flanders and Norway. Despite the development in other aspects, the proportion of Q1 and Q2 journals is often on the rise, most significantly in
History and Archaeology (Czech Republic, Poland, and Flanders) and
Languages and Literature (Norway). In the Czech Republic, the rising share of articles in all Social Sciences disciplines is followed by the growing coverage in the Web of Science and growing proportion in Q1 and Q2 journals. The exception is
Economics and Business , where the share of articles remains stable, and
Educational Sciences , where the coverage remains stable; still, the share and quality grow in the observed period. The situation in Poland is 8 somewhat different, as the number of articles as well as the share of articles is in nearly all fields in the period 2013–2016 stable or declining after a substantial increase in previous years. Except for
Psychology , the coverage is likewise stable or even decreasing, but this trend is related to the growing proportion of articles in more prestigious journals. As our study shows, some disciplines pay more attention than others to journal articles as a publication channel in relation to the increase of the coverage of article in WoS and towards higher representation in prestigious journals. Importantly, the disciplines with such characteristics are not the same across countries. In the CEE countries (the Czech Republic and Poland in this instance),
Psychology shows a balanced development towards greater visibility (coverage and prestige of journals). In contrast to
Psychology , other disciplines developed differently in the CEE countries. In the Czech Republic, all Social Sciences and some Humanities slightly grow in terms of the share of articles, but the coverage either remains low or grows only modestly (
Educational sciences, Sociology, Languages and literature, Arts ), while for
Economics and business and
Political science the coverage of articles grows even though their share has not changed much. In Poland, all SSH disciplines except Psychology display very low coverage and almost unchanged share of articles and their coverage, whereas the overall share of influential journals in SSH is on the rise. It may be useful to take into consideration not only the differences in the coverage of articles and dynamics of the trend between STM and SSH, but also between individual disciplines or their clusters within SSH when applying bibliometrics and finding ways of assessment of the research impact in evaluation systems. These findings correspond with findings from the analysis of activity, collaboration, impact, and visibility using both traditional and alternative metrics presented by De Filippo and Sanz-Casado (2018) for three social sciences disciplines. Differences in publication patterns are not only related to the publication practices in the given discipline but also rooted in differences in scholarly traditions across the countries. Although there are differences among the disciplines, the overall pattern in the percentage of articles in WoS-covered journals and in journal impact profiles is characterised by a significant gap between the CEE and Western/Nordic countries; this gap is influenced by cultural and historical heritage, and more specifically in the ability and commitment to communicate in a foreign language among other reasons (Kulczycki et al. 2018). The incentives for adopting different practices are also often provided by local Performance-based Research Funding Systems (PRFS); as an example, in the Czech Republic, the effect of PRFS on the strategic behaviour of researchers is documented well (Good et al. 2015; Linková 2012; Linková and Stöckelová
Economics (Kulczycki et al. 2018), the share of articles is significantly low in the Czech Republic in comparison with Poland. In contrast, massive production in a few Czech-based economic journals or massive production of conference proceedings, which are not core of publishing activities in most SSH disciplines, is observed. However, the Czech evaluation methodology significantly changed in 9 2017. With eliminating the straightforward linking scores (“points”) of individual publications with money, the new evaluation system strives to avoid stimulating unwanted behaviour. Further, in the case of Poland, the straightforward preference of articles in international journals in national and institutional contexts (Kulczycki and Rozkosz 2017) may have resulted in the growth in the coverage of articles in WoS in many SSH disciplines revealed by this study, although the changes are happening slowly. These observations raise several questions. Does the change in the coverage correspond to the efforts of researchers who reflect the intra-discipline changes and/or the push to submit (local) journals to WoS in order to increase the chance for cashing in in the frame of the national PRFS? Albeit we know from our own experience that both options can be valid for some disciplines, results of our simple comparison (Figures 9-11) show that publishing in domestic journals (regardless the percentage of domestic authors in these journals) does not seem to influence the increasing coverage. Empirical research is needed to answer these questions more properly. In the study, we tackled several limitations related to national databases, which were identified and conceptualised in previous studies (Guns et al. 2018, Sīle et al. 2018, Sīle 2019). One of the most important limitations of the study lies in analysing the data of scientific disciplines determined by different methods of classification: cognitive (Czech Republic, Norway, Slovakia), or organisational (Poland, Flanders). The analysis and theoretical framework set by Guns et al. (2018) gives a warning for cross-country comparisons like the present study. Moreover, we assign the data about journals related to WoS categories to the data about articles in disciplines identified by the national database. According to Guns et al. (2018), 73% of Flemish publications identified by organisational classification in Humanities disciplines is published in channels belonging to Humanities whereas this ratio is only 59% for Social Sciences. However, regarding the objectives of this study, we cannot work solely for instance with the cognitive classification resulting from the journal classification in the Web of Science, as this could make it difficult to understand how the discipline identifies itself in each country through the set of publications. Thus, one of the possible results of this study is highlighting the ability of the disciplines to place the research in outlets with particular prestige or influence expressed by the impact measure (IF), even though the classification of the journal in WoS is different from the one in the national database.. This approach is ultimately similar to the modus operandi of evaluating results in the Czech research evaluation. When reporting results for the evaluation, each publication is included in the national bibliographic database (RIV) with the cognitive classification determined by the author according to the focus of the research topic. The subset of WoS- and Scopus-indexed publications is henceforward assessed on a basis of journal-level indicator in the classification scheme determined by Web of Science or Scopus respectively. In this study, we found differences in the representation of articles in Web of Science across SSH disciplines and across countries within these disciplines. Concerning the disciplines, performance-based research assessment should pay attention to the diversity of the disciplines and should not apply mechanisms punishing typical patterns in certain fields (Sivertsen 2016). In the case of the Czech Republic, national evaluation after 2017 is designed as a robust process comprising bibliometrics, societal relevance, viability, and strategies of research organisations. However, in the bibliometric component of the evaluation, the journal-level indicator still plays the main role. The performance in each discipline and in each research organization is seen as the “quality” profile reflecting the distribution of articles in quartiles derived from the ranking by the Article Influence Score. In this respect, PRFS exposes SSH disciplines to the new challenge of being analysed through the publication performance in influential journals. Based 0 on the results of the first two years of yearly evaluation, members of expert panels commenting on the analysis criticised the “apparently” low quality of research in SSH disciplines (unpublished). Previous research also argued that performance in post-communist countries still does not meet the level of Western countries (Vanecek 2014; Jurajda et al. 2017). If based solely on the journal-level indicator, we can only agree with this simple conclusion. Nevertheless, we argue that the patterns should be seen from a much broader viewpoint which would reflect different contexts and starting points. Statements based on sole or inappropriate indicator without understanding the background and recent developments might negatively shape research policies or even the public view. More specifically, evaluation systems should not punish SSH disciplines on the basis of inappropriate measures. The comparison of publication patterns in terms of the coverage and share of the articles shows that in most SSH disciplines the patterns in the CEE countries differ from patterns in Western or Nordic countries. This signifies that the differences come from the different national cultural and political background rather than from the characteristics of a given discipline across Europe. It should be pointed out that we do not claim that the journal article in WoS indexed journal is the most demanded publication channel for all disciplines, including SSH. However, we argue that publishing habits in SSH in CEE countries do not need to be maintained on the basis of misplaced or outdated arguments and assumptions. The idea of protecting local excellence should not be confused with rigidity, evading international resources, and isolation of SSH disciplines. SSH research in post-communist countries has much to say even in international context and especially so in social sciences. Nevertheless, our comparison shows that the potential for creating impact internationally, as the extent to which SSH disciplines use WoS-indexed articles as a publication channel, has still room for improvement in comparison with Western and Nordic countries. Locally relevant research published in national languages is important especially for SSH, but chronicity in local topics and isolation of SSH disciplines may limit the development of these disciplines in the national and international context.
Conclusions
Our study extends the previous studies on publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities to the area of the quality of publication outlets and contributes to building recent characteristics of publication profile of Social Sciences and Humanities and their possible implications in science policy and research evaluation. The results discussed above show that despite some fluctuations, the publication patterns in Social Sciences and Humanities in CEE countries changed towards to a broader representation in Web of Science and within WoS in journals of greater influence (journals with IF and within JCR those in Q1+Q2 in the discipline ranking by the impact factor). Despite the obvious distinction between the group of CEE countries and the two Western/Nordic countries across all disciplines, the CEE countries show the same increasing trend of approaching Western and Nordic countries, albeit with different intensity. In the Czech Republic, the growing trend in the share of journal articles is often related to the coverage and the changing representation in prestigious journals. In Poland, the share of articles in all Humanities disciplines goes down in relation to the positive development towards more influential journals. Publication patterns in SSH in Central and Eastern European countries change in favour of WoS-indexed journal articles and in favour of those ranked higher in the Journal Citation Reports according to the impact factor. There are nonetheless major dissimilarities in the dynamics between countries and individual disciplines even within a subject area such as Social Sciences and Humanities. Hence, we suggest taking the differences even within Social Sciences and Humanities into account for bibliometrics, research evaluation, and science policy. 1
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Table 4. The share of journal articles – Social Sciences.
Czech Republic
Slovakia
Poland
Norway
Flanders
Economics and business
Czech Republic 659 37.5% 584 34.2% 579 34.0% 622 38.8% Slovakia
Educational sciences
Czech Republic 815 35.4% 771 35.6% 789 39.1% 744 41.9% Slovakia
547 21.1% 607 26.7% 602 28.1% Poland 1426 33.3% 1685 33.7% 1706 32.6% 1568 32.9% Norway 424 46.8% 492 45.9% 527 53.4% 588 54.8% Flanders 168 71.5% 188 69.9% 188 70.4%
Sociology
Czech Republic 410 44.8% 409 47.3% 443 53.8% 382 51.6% Slovakia
Poland 1144 38.3% 1282 38.9% 1281 36.6% 1057 35.0% Norway 335 71.7% 365 66.2% 388 72.3% 467 77.8% Flanders 261 57.9% 266 61.6% 265 57.4%
Law
Czech Republic 681 46.1% 899 49.2% 737 44.3% 773 46.8% Slovakia
309 18.5% 375 19.7% 450 21.6% Poland 3406 40.6% 3691 39.9% 3507 37.6% 2925 30.8% Norway 209 44.2% 219 53.4% 216 51.6% 207 40.0% Flanders 724 74.5% 774 70.6% 701 69.6%
Political science
Czech Republic 1273 45.8% 1118 37.5% 1238 40.8% 1220 47.0% Slovakia
Poland 1250 36.0% 1336 34.4% 1429 37.6% 1222 33.0% Norway 284 54.4% 269 51.3% 310 53.1% 287 50.5% Flanders 176 64.2% 199 67.0% 155 55.4%
Social and economic geography
Czech Republic 45 34.1% 41 36.3% 44 32.6% 48 34.8% Slovakia
Poland Norway 270 64.3% 286 68.3% 266 59.4% 306 65.5% Flanders 188 85.1% 211 91.3% 173 92.5%
Media and communications
Czech Republic 104 49.8% 116 45.0% 87 39.2% 91 39.9% Slovakia
Poland 329 38.9% 331 38.7% 319 33.6% 267 28.0% Norway 103 55.4% 95 43.4% 100 45.0% 121 48.8% Flanders 124 76.1% 133 71.1% 149 81.4%
Other social sciences
Czech Republic 149 44.5% 156 44.7% 163 68.2% 199 58.7% Slovakia
Poland 719 42.6% 792 39.7% 777 34.4% 679 33.6% Norway 404 59.1% 403 65.4% 503 62.4% 503 71.7% Flanders 44 62.0% 45 47.9% 34 52.3%
Table 5. The share of journal articles – Humanities.
Czech Republic 1155 45.7% 1298 44.9% 1252 45.7% 1162 44.3% Slovakia
182 23.8% 196 28.7% 226 32.9% Poland 2359 39.2% 2443 35.1% 2393 34.7% 1784 28.3% Norway 223 46.1% 215 36.3% 287 51.3% 236 48.9% Flanders 274 79.2% 273 67.4% 219 73.7%
Languages and literature
Czech Republic 808 42.3% 815 40.4% 810 40.0% 828 47.6% Slovakia
Poland 4270 42.2% 4569 37.6% 4667 35.9% 3801 31.6% Norway 422 55.0% 508 56.3% 449 61.0% 435 56.5% Flanders 451 50.0% 437 59.0% 365 64.4%
Philosophy, ethics and religion
Czech Republic 475 49.2% 588 55.1% 507 50.0% 482 51.7% Slovakia
Poland 1995 46.8% 1968 45.2% 2060 44.5% 1771 42.8% Norway 281 48.0% 324 58.5% 353 57.1% 292 53.0% Flanders 251 52.0% 299 53.4% 215 55.3%
Arts
Czech Republic 526 39.0% 617 40.8% 615 40.1% 558 44.1% Slovakia
27 20.1% 49 27.1% 39 23.8% Poland 541 44.6% 585 41.0% 492 35.5% 363 25.5% Norway 154 59.9% 172 59.9% 185 66.3% 153 57.3% Flanders 103 43.1% 117 48.8% 105 49.3%
Other humanities
Czech Republic
6 40.0% Slovakia Poland 510 46.2% 530 38.0% 546 36.9% 406 36.2% Norway 102 65.4% 97 48.3% 150 63.6% 89 63.1% Flanders 29 87.9% 39 92.9% 34 97.1%
Table 6. The coverage of journal articles in WoS – Social Sciences.
Czech Republic 85 35.9% 94 43.3% 117 47.0% 149 46.7% Poland 352 35.1% 423 38.0% 471 41.0% 535 46.2% Norway 413 77.3% 437 79.6% 426 78.3% 482 78.1% Flanders 505 91.0% 533 92.9% 507 90.9%
Economics and business
Czech Republic 197 29.9% 231 39.6% 248 42.8% 291 46.8% Slovakia 156 10.4% 198 13.7% 259 19.0% Poland 714 7.0% 870 8.1% 1087 10.7% 1025 10.6% Norway 515 71.7% 539 72.4% 595 75.2% 657 73.2% Flanders 381 81.4% 375 80.0% 348 87.0%
Educational sciences
Czech Republic 74 9.1% 72 9.3% 95 12.0% 94 12.6% Slovakia 64 11.7% 48 7.9% 104 17.3% Poland 47 3.3% 70 4.2% 75 4.4% 95 6.1% Norway 167 39.3% 217 44.1% 230 43.6% 273 46.4% Flanders 126 75.0% 126 67.0% 138 73.4%
Sociology
Czech Republic 122 29.8% 111 27.2% 134 30.3% 131 34.2% Poland 115 10.1% 118 9.2% 133 10.4% 112 10.6% Norway 230 68.7% 242 66.3% 269 69.3% 295 63.2% Flanders 174 66.7% 183 68.8% 205 77.4%
Law
Czech Republic 18 2.6% 26 2.9% 21 2.8% 29 3.8% Slovakia 6 1.9% 3.8 4.0% 14 3.1% Poland 57 1.7% 92 2.5% 129 3.7% 109 3.7% Norway 54 25.8% 63 28.8% 55 25.5% 53 25.6% Flanders 90 12.4% 123 15.9% 113 16.1%
Political science
Czech Republic 227 17.8% 231 20.7% 327 26.4% 332 27.2% Poland 36 2.9% 47 3.5% 65 4.5% 57 4.7% Norway 212 75.4% 211 77.6% 257 82.9% 218 76.0% Flanders 94 53.4% 119 59.8% 102 65.8%
Social and economic geography
Czech Republic 5 11.1% 10 24.4% 16 36.4% 17 35.4% Norway 237 87.8% 246 86.3% 229 85.8% 268 87.6% Flanders 164 87.2% 180 85.3% 149 86.1%
Media and communications Czech Republic 20 19.2% 25 21.6% 26 29.9% 16 17.6% Poland 9 2.7% 14 4.2% 16 5.0% 10 3.7% Norway 62 60.2% 58 61.1% 54 54.0% 72 59.5% Flanders 77 62.1% 91 68.4% 105 70.5%
Other social sciences
Czech Republic 27 18.1% 64 41.0% 82 50.3% 85 42.7% Slovakia 76 16.1% 75 14.9% 152 28.4% Poland 72 10.0% 49 6.2% 94 12.1% 51 7.5% Norway 212 52.5% 210 52.2% 259 51.5% 273 54.3% Flanders 21 47.7% 23 51.1% 22 64.7%
Table 7. The coverage of journal articles in WoS – Humanities.
Table 8. Distribution of articles according to journal impact measure within WoS. year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other Psychology
CZE
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other CZE
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other Law
CZE
Political science
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other Social and economic geography
CZE
Media and communications
CZE
Other social sciences
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other CZE
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other CZE
0 1 100.0% 2016 0 0 4 80.0% 1 20.0% 0 POL
CZE year Q1+Q2 Q3+Q4 AHCI ESCI Other Figure 12. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Czech Republic – Social Sciences.
Figure 13. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Slovakia – Social Sciences. Figure 14. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Poland – Social Sciences.
Figure 15. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Norway – Social Sciences.
Figure 16. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Flanders – Social Sciences. Figure 17. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Czech Republic – Humanities.
Figure 18. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Slovakia – Humanities.
Figure 19. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Poland – Humanities. Figure 20. The distribution of journal articles in WoS citation indexes. Norway – Humanities.