Abstract
This study investigates bibliometric characteristics of publications on sign languages indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index between 1900 and 2013, and arts and humanities citation index between 1975 and 2013 in web of science (WoS). There were 2460 scientific publications on sign languages from a variety of research areas written in 14 languages with authors from 66 countries. 95.24% of them were written in English while 49.71% of authors were from the USA. Although the first publication appeared in 1902, the number of publications has recently increased: 86.26% of them were covered in WoS between 1990 and 2013. A majority of the publications were on American Sign Language and British Sign Language, with 63.46% and 9.33% of all publications, respectively. The number of sign language publications will continue to increase in WoS, covering a wider variety of sign languages.
Highlights
Citation indices like web of science (WoS) cover timely published journals, which have referee systems and higher impact factors.[1]
Even though studies investigating the sign languages of deaf people are relatively new compared to those investigating spoken languages, they are very crucial to exploring human language capacity from language emergence on Al‐Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language and on Nicaraguan Sign Language to language acquisition.[7,8,9,10,11]
Studies are being conducted on sign languages from all aspects of linguistics, from grammar (American Sign Language; British Sign Language; and Australian Sign Language) to identity, education, culture, and language policies.[12,13,14,15]
Summary
Citation indices like web of science (WoS) cover timely published journals, which have referee systems and higher impact factors.[1]. Publications indexed in WoS gained increased attention from researchers and institutions to assess scientific productivity and quality of publication, and to compete with universities and research institutes (inter) nationally Having publications in these indices appears to be important for job hunting of new PhD holders, promotion of faculty members, and the respectability of researchers in and across several fields of study.[2,3,4,5,6]. The current study examines the main bibliometric characteristics of scientific outputs of sign language research as represented in SCI‐expanded, SSCI, and A and HCI. It was hypothesized that as a relatively new research field, (1) the number of sign language publications has significantly increased in last decades, but (2) all known sign languages are not represented in WoS. The present study answers the following questions: What are the main bibliometric characteristics of sign language publications in SCI‐Expanded and SSCI since 1900 and A and HCI since 1975? How often do publications on sign languages appear in WoS? Which sign languages are represented in WoS?
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