The diversity of monographs: changing landscape of book evaluation in Poland

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine the characteristic patterns of monographs in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences published by Polish scholars. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the Polish book evaluation system to explain how monographs are assessed and illustrate how changes in the definitions of the types of scholarly book publications influence publication patterns.Design/methodology/approachThis paper analyses bibliographic records of 42,307 monographs published by Polish scholars in the humanities and science fields from 2009 to 2016. Through a bibliometric analysis, the paper investigates the characteristic patterns of the monographs, including authorship, publication language and length, across three fields.FindingsThe present study demonstrates that changes in the definitions of scholarly book publications in Poland have significantly influenced the characteristic patterns of monographs. The analysis of the characteristic patterns across three fields reveals that the monographs are different in terms of all characteristics. In the entire period, 85.3 percent monographs were written in Polish, 10.1 percent in English, 1.4 percent in German, 1.1 percent in Russian and 2.1 percent in 39 other languages. The most significant changes are observed in authorship patterns.Originality/valueThis work offers empirical findings on the characteristic patterns of monographs in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences from a non-English speaking country. It discusses a unique model of book assessment and shows certain consequences of various overly formalized procedures of evaluation. Thus, the study identifies the major challenges and implications of using highly formalized procedures for book evaluation.