Tim C.E. Engels

Changing publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2000–2009

An analysis of the changing publication patterns in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the period 2000–2009 is presented on the basis of the VABB-SHW, a full coverage database of peer reviewed publication output in SSH developed for the region of Flanders, Belgium. Data collection took place as part of the Flemish performance-based funding system for university research. The development of the database is described and an overview of its contents presented. In terms of coverage of publications by the Web of Science we observe considerable differences across disciplines in the SSH. The overall growth rate in number of publications is over 62.1%, but varies across disciplines between 7.5 and 172.9%. Publication output grew faster in the Social Sciences than in the Humanities. A steady increase in the number and the proportion of publications in English is observed, going hand in hand with a decline in publishing in Dutch and other languages. However, no overall shift away from book publishing is observed. In the Humanities, the share of book publications even seems to be increasing. The study shows that additional full coverage regional databases are needed to be able to characterise publication output in the SSH.

Altmetrics for the humanities: Comparing Goodreads reader ratings with citations to history books

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the value of Goodreads reader ratings for measuring the wider impact of scholarly books published in the field of History. Design/methodology/approach – Book titles were extracted from the reference lists of articles that appeared in 604 history journals indexed in Scopus (2007-2011). The titles were cleaned and matched with WorldCat.org (for publisher information) as well as Goodreads (for reader ratings) using an API. A set of 8,538 books was first filtered based on Dewey Decimal Classification class 900 “History and Geography”, then a subset of 997 books with the highest citations and reader ratings (i.e. top 25 per cent) was analysed separately based on additional characteristics. Findings – A weak correlation (0.212) was found between citation counts and reader rating counts for the full data set (n=8,538). An additional correlation for the subset of 997 books indicated a similar weak correlation (0.190). Further correlations between citations, reader ...

A label for peer-reviewed books

The Publishers Association of Flanders, Belgium, has created a label for peer-reviewed books: the Guaranteed Peer Reviewed Content GPRC label www.gprc.be/en. We introduce the label and the logic behind it. A label for peer-reviewed books encourages transparency in academic book publishing. It is especially relevant for the social sciences and humanities and in the context of performance-based funding of university research.

Coauthorship of journal articles and book chapters in the social sciences and humanities 2000-2010

This study analyzes coauthorship patterns in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) for the period 2000 to 2010. The basis for the analysis is the Flemish Academic Bibliographic Database for the Social Sciences and Humanities (VABB‐SHW), a comprehensive bibliographic database of peer‐reviewed publications in the SSH by researchers affiliated with Flemish universities. Combining data on journal articles and book chapters, our findings indicate that collaborative publishing in the SSH is increasing, though considerable differences between disciplines remain. Conversely, we did observe a sharp decline in single‐author publishing. We further demonstrate that coauthored SSH articles in journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) generally have a higher (and growing) number of coauthors than do either those in non‐WoS journals or book chapters. This illustrates the need to include non‐WoS data and book chapters when studying coauthorship in the SSH.

Taking scholarly books into account: current developments in five European countries

For academic book authors and the institutions assessing their research performance, the relevance of books is undisputed. In spite of this, the absence of comprehensive international databases covering the items and information needed for the assessment of this type of publication has urged several European countries to develop custom-built information systems for the registration of scholarly books, as well as weighting and funding allocation procedures. For the first time, these systems make the assessment of books as a research output feasible. The present paper summarizes the main features of the registration and/or assessment systems developed in five European countries/regions (Spain, Denmark, Flanders, Finland and Norway), focusing on the processes involved in the collection and processing of data on book publications, their weighting, as well as the application in the context of research assessment and funding.

Barycenter representation of book publishing internationalization in the Social Sciences and Humanities

This paper introduces a novel application in bibliometrics of the barycenter method. Using places of publication barycenters, we measure internationalization of book publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Based on 2002–2011 data for Flanders, Belgium, we demonstrate how the geographic center of weight of book publishing is different for the Social Sciences than for the Humanities. Whereas the latter still rely predominantly on domestic Flemish and continental European publishers, the former are firmly Anglo-Saxon oriented. The Humanities, however, show a more pronounced evolution toward further internationalization. For the already largely internationally oriented Social Sciences, in most recent years, the share of British publishers has grown. The barycenter method proves to be a valuable tool in the representation of research internationalization of book publications. This is especially the case when applied non-Anglophone countries.

Internationalization of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed book publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities

In this article barycenters of the places of publication of monographs, edited books and book chapters are used to represent the internationalization of research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) as practiced at universities in Flanders (Belgium). Our findings indicate that, in terms of places of publication, the distance between peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed SSH book literature is growing. Whereas peer reviewed books are increasingly published abroad and in English, non-peer reviewed book literature remains firmly domestic and published in the Dutch language. This divergence is more the case for the Social Sciences than for the Humanities. For Law we have found a pattern along the lines of the Social Sciences. We discuss these findings in view of the two main readerships of SSH publications: international academia on the one hand, and a mostly domestic intelligentsia on the other.

Is the expertise of evaluation panels congruent with the research interests of the research groups: A quantitative approach based on barycenters

Discipline-specific research evaluation exercises are typically carried out by panels of peers, known as expert panels. To the best of our knowledge, no methods are available to measure overlap in expertise between an expert panel and the units under evaluation. This paper explores bibliometric approaches to determine this overlap, using two research evaluations of the departments of Chemistry (2009) and Physics (2010) of the University of Antwerp as a test case. We explore the usefulness of overlay mapping on a global map of science (with Web of Science subject categories) to gauge overlap of expertise and introduce a set of methods to determine an entitys barycenter according to its publication output. Barycenters can be calculated starting from a similarity matrix of subject categories (N dimensions) or from a visualization thereof (2 dimensions). We compare the results of the N-dimensional method with those of two 2-dimensional ones (Kamada–Kawai maps and VOS maps) and find that they yield very similar results. The distance between barycenters is used as an indicator of expertise overlap. The results reveal that there is some discrepancy between the panels and the groups’ publications in both the Chemistry and the Physics departments. The panels were not as diverse as the groups that were assessed. The match between the Chemistry panel and the Department was better than that between the Physics panel and the Department.

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

This study investigates patterns in the language and type of social sciences and humanities (SSH) publications in non-English speaking European countries to demonstrate that such patterns are related not only to discipline but also to each country’s cultural and historic heritage. We investigate publication patterns that occur across SSH publications of the whole of the SSH and of economics and business, law, and philosophy and theology publications in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders (Belgium), Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We use data from 74,022 peer-reviewed publications from 2014 registered in at least one of the eight countries’ national databases and for 272,376 peer-reviewed publications from the period of 2011–2014 registered in at least one of the seven countries’ national databases (for all countries except Slovakia). Our findings show that publication patterns differ both between fields (e.g. patterns in law differ from those in economics and business in the same way in Flanders and Finland) and within fields (e.g. patterns in law in the Czech Republic differ from patterns in law in Finland). We observe that the publication patterns are stable and quite similar in West European and Nordic countries, whereas in Central and Eastern European countries the publication patterns demonstrate considerable changes. Nevertheless, in all countries, the share of articles and the share of publications in English is on the rise. We conclude with recommendations for science policy and highlight that internationalization policies in non-English speaking countries should consider various starting points and cultural heritages in different countries.

Measuring the match between evaluators and evaluees: cognitive distances between panel members and research groups at the journal level

When research groups are evaluated by an expert panel, it is an open question how one can determine the match between panel and research groups. In this paper, we outline two quantitative approaches that determine the cognitive distance between evaluators and evaluees, based on the journals they have published in. We use example data from four research evaluations carried out between 2009 and 2014 at the University of Antwerp.While the barycenter approach is based on a journal map, the similarity-adapted publication vector (SAPV) approach is based on the full journal similarity matrix. Both approaches determine an entity’s profile based on the journals in which it has published. Subsequently, we determine the Euclidean distance between the barycenter or SAPV profiles of two entities as an indicator of the cognitive distance between them. Using a bootstrapping approach, we determine confidence intervals for these distances. As such, the present article constitutes a refinement of a previous proposal that operates on the level of Web of Science subject categories.