Browsing by Author "Engels, Tim C.E."
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Item Are book publications disappearing from scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities?(2018) Engels, Tim C.E.; Istenič Starčič, Andreja; Kulczycki, Emanuel; Pölönen, Janne; Sivertsen, GunnarPurpose – 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 detrimental effects of research evaluation systems on scholarly book publishing. The authors show that there is little reason to suspect a dramatic decline of scholarly book publishing in an SSH.Item Are book publications disappearing from scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities?(2018) Engels, Tim C.E.; Istenič Starčič, Andreja; Kulczycki, Emanuel; Pölönen, Janne; Sivertsen, GunnarIn the social sciences and humanities book publishing takes a prominent role, both in terms of communicating with international peers and with a broader intelligentsia (Hicks, 2004; Verleysen & Engels, 2014). Empirical evidence regarding the evolution of the share of scholarly book publications in the total volume of scholarly publications in a given country is rare. In this study we intend to fill this gap with an analysis of the comprehensive coverage data on the share of peer reviewed book publications (book chapters, edited volumes and monographs) that are available from Flanders and Slovenia for the period 2004 to 2015. We supplement these data with data on peer reviewed book chapters and monographs from Norway for the period 2005-2015 as well as data on all types of peer reviewed book publishing for the period 2009 to 2014 for Poland and 2011 to 2015 for Finland.Item Comprehensiveness of national bibliographic databases for social sciences and humanities: Findings from a European survey(2018) Sīle, Linda; Pölönen, Janne; Sivertsen, Gunnar; Guns, Raf; Engels, Tim C.E.; Arefiev, Pavel; Dušková, Marta; Faurbæk, Lotte; Holl, András; Kulczycki, Emanuel; Macan, Bojan; Nelhans, Gustaf; Petr, Michal; Pisk, Marjeta; Soós, Sándor; Stojanovski, Jadranka; Stone, Ari; Šušol, Jaroslav; Teitelbaum, RuthThis article provides an overview of national bibliographic databases that include data on research output within social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Europe. We focus on the comprehensiveness of the database content. Compared to the data from commercial databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, data from national bibliographic databases (e.g. Flemish Academic Bibliographic Database for the SSH (VABB-SHW) in Belgium, Current Research Information System in Norway (CRISTIN)) are more comprehensive and may, therefore, be better fit for bibliometric analyses. Acknowledging this, several countries within Europe maintain national bibliographic databases; detailed and comparative information about their content, however, has been limited. In autumn 2016, we launched a survey to acquire an overview of national bibliographic databases for SSH in Europe and Israel. Surveying 41 countries (responses received from 39 countries), we identified 21 national bibliographic databases for SSH. Further, we acquired a more detailed description of 13 databases, with a focus on their comprehensiveness. Findings indicate that even though the content of national bibliographic databases is diverse, it is possible to delineate a subset that is similar across databases. At the same time, it is apparent that differences in national bibliographic databases are often bound to differences in country-specific arrangements. Considering this, we highlight implications to bibliometric analyses based on data from national bibliographic databases and outline several aspects that may be taken into account in the development of existing national bibliographic databases for SSH or the design of new ones.Item Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities in Flanders and Poland(2017) Kulczycki, Emanuel; Engels, Tim C.E.; Nowotniak, RobertThis paper investigates internationalization patterns in the language and type of social sciences and humanities publications in non-English speaking countries. This research aims to demonstrate that such patterns are related not only to discipline but also to each country’s cultural and historic heritage. We used data from Flemish and Polish databases collected between 2009 and 2014. In Flanders, on the one hand, we found that changes in the use of languages and publication types were moderate and occurred gradually over several years. In Poland, on the other hand, we found significant shifts in the use of certain publication types, sometimes from year to year. Examining the social sciences and humanities literature both as a whole and broken down by discipline, we observed similar variability over time in the proportion of work published in English and in article form. However, we found remarkable differences between Flanders and Poland regarding the most commonly used languages and publication types. Overall, we found few similarities between Flemish and Polish social sciences and humanities publication patterns.Item Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: Evidence from eight European countries(2018) Kulczycki, Emanuel; Engels, Tim C.E.; Pölönen, Janne; Bruun, Kasper; Dušková, Marta; Guns, Raf; Nowotniak, Robert; Petr, Michal; Sivertsen, Gunnar; Istenič Starčič, Andreja; Zuccala, AlesiaThis 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.Item Taking national language publications into account: the case of the Finnish performance-based research funding system(2018) Pölönen, Janne; Auranen, Otto; Engels, Tim C.E.; Kulczycki, EmanuelIn this paper we investigate how a publication indicator developed for the performance-based research funding system (PRFS) in Finland takes national language publications into account. Our analysis is based on 47423 peer-reviewed SSH outputs from 14 Finnish universities published in 2011-2016. SSH research community in Finland is increasingly concerned about the national language publishing. Incentives for English language journal publishing are attributed to the PRFS for allocating block grant annually to universities. In the Norwegian model adopted also in Finland, the weight of outputs in the funding-scheme is dependent on the quality index of publication channels. Our analysis shows that the rating of publication channels results in a fairly balanced representation of Finnish, Swedish and English language journal articles in the PRFS. The system is more favorable to English than Finnish and Swedish language book publications. Publications in other languages, however, are under-represented in the PRFS. The number of journal articles in Finnish has remained relatively stable. The number of Finnish book publications, however, is declining in both low and high rated outlets. We speculate that in addition to the PRFS, publishing patterns are influenced by increased international competition for positions and project funding, as well as other factors than research evaluation.