Abstract
This article investigates the developments during the last decades in the use of languages, publication types and publication channels in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The purpose is to develop an understanding of the processes of internationalization and to apply this understanding in a critical examination of two often used general criteria in research evaluations in the SSH. One of them is that the coverage of a publication in Scopus or Web of Science is seen in itself as an expression of research quality and of internationalization. The other is that a specific international language, English, and a specific type of publication, journal articles, are perceived as supreme in a general hierarchy of languages and publication types. Simple distinctions based on these criteria are contrary to the heterogeneous publication patterns needed in the SSH to organize their research adequately, present their results properly, reach their audiences efficiently, and thereby fulfil their missions. Research quality, internationalization, and societal relevance can be promoted in research assessment in the SSH without categorical hierarchies of publications. I will demonstrate this by using data from scholarly publishing in the SSH that go beyond the coverage in the commercial data sources in order to give a more comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing in the SSH.
Highlights
The presence of publications in Scopus or Web of Science (WoS) has increasingly become a criterion in evaluations of research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH)
The SSH would lose their raison d’etre by disconnecting from the surrounding culture and society and by mainly communicating in international journals that are only read by peers abroad
The scholarly publication types in the SSH are often discussed as if they represent alternatives to each other: Is the use of one of the publication types increasing at the cost of the others? Are monographs becoming obsolete in the SSH? Before we study the trends, Table 1 Number and percentage publications per publication type Humanities (N) Humanities (%)
Summary
The presence of publications in Scopus or Web of Science (WoS) has increasingly become a criterion in evaluations of research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Just as with the abuse of Journal Impact Factors in research assessment of individual performance in science, technology and medicine (STM), the ‘coverage criterion’ in the SSH represents an artefact which is external to and beyond the control of the scholarly norms and standards that it is sought to represent It creates unnecessary tensions between fields in the SSH with different degrees of coverage in the databases. In these debates, the general development towards publishing in journals covered by Scopus or Web of Science is often perceived as ‘‘inevitable’’ and driven by new evaluation regimes, not by internal scholarly standards. My contribution here will be to lay the ground for a renewed discussion of assessment criteria (representing expectations) in the SSH by using bibliometric methods and data (representing observations) to demonstrate the actual patterns and developments in scholarly publication practices from the perspective of internationalization
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