The presence of Polish, Hungarian and Slovak Publications in the Field of Education in the Web of Science Database. A Bibliometric Comparative Study

Abstract

Abstract The author of this article aims at comparing the publication activity of scholars from Poland, Slovakia and Hungary in education in the period of 1994-2014. Based on the comparative analyses, the author sought to determine: (1) trends in the scholarly performance in the analysed field of study (increase/decrease), (2) leading scientific institutions with the largest number of publications in the field of education, (3) scale of internationalization (international co-authorship). Furthermore (4) the author discusses the participation of scientists from the countries under analysis in the European (EU) and worldwide circulation of scholarly papers in the field of education. To perform the analyses, first the representative source had to be chosen. Considering that what is valued in science, also in Europe, is the prestige of a journal in which a paper is published while the overall science hierarchy is primarily based on the global grading of scholarly journals, we have chosen to use the data from the Thomson/Reuters database (Web of ScienceTM Core Collection) containing an index of selected papers with the so-called impact factor (IF), a well-known global indication of citation impact. Several publications in the journals with high IF is a confirmation of the high quality of scientific research while it also determines the level of internationalization of science. This study was conducted over twenty years (1994-2014) to make sure it was representative of the publishing activity and international output of scholars from the countries under analysis.