To What Extent Do Successive Cohorts Adopt Different Publication Patterns? Peer Review, Language Use, and Publication Types in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Raf Guns,Joshua Eykens,Tim C E Engels

doi:10.3389/frma.2018.00038

Raf Guns, Joshua Eykens + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2018.00038

Copy DOI

Abstract

This article presents a cohort analysis to study changes in the publication patterns of scholars working at a social sciences and humanities (SSH) university department or research unit in Flanders, Belgium. Starting from a comprehensive bibliographic database, we analyze the peer review status, publication language, publication type (journal article, book publication, or proceedings), and coverage in Web of Science (WoS) for publications produced between 2000 and 2014. Through a cohort analysis of the authors, a distinction can be made between effects that reflect changes in the characteristics of how researchers of comparable seniority publish (intracohort change) and effects that are due to the disappearance of researchers and/or introduction of new researchers (cohort succession). Our findings indicate that there is a trend across all five cohorts and in both the social sciences and humanities towards peer review, use of English, and publishing in WoS-indexed journals. While we witness clear intracohort changes, cohort succession effects are shown to be much weaker. The oldest cohort appears to maintain a traditional SSH profile, with lower shares of peer-reviewed publications, publications in English, journal articles, and publications indexed in WoS. As for publication types, all cohorts exhibit a slightly declining share of journal articles over time in favor of book publications, particularly in the humanities. The study shows that cohort analysis is a useful instrument to gain better insight into the evolution of publication patterns.

Highlights

Quantitative studies of scholarly communication have traditionally been mostly applied to STEM fields, with only scant attention being directed toward the social sciences and humanities (SSH)
With the exception of cohort A, all cohorts are roughly comparable: several lines cross, and the stability intervals overlap. This shift toward peer-reviewed publications might be related to the introduction of and changes in the Flemish PRFS (Guns and Engels, 2016), but it is worth pointing out that the changes predate the addition of the VABB-SHW to the PRFS (Engels and Guns, 2018)
To enhance our understanding of how changes in publication patterns come about, we have carried out a cohort analysis of 15 years of SSH research

Summary

Introduction

Quantitative studies of scholarly communication have traditionally been mostly applied to STEM fields, with only scant attention being directed toward the social sciences and humanities (SSH) The reasons for this are manifold, but include the heterogeneity of the SSH and the fact that the SSH are generally less well-covered in Web of Science and Scopus, the traditional data sources for most bibliometric studies (Hicks, 1999; Archambault et al, 2006; Hicks and Wang, 2011). Several national databases or repositories for research output have been set up (Sile et al, 2017, 2018) Examples of such databases include CROSBI in Croatia, RINC in Russia, and VIRTA in Finland. While most of these databases do not include citation information, they can be used for various analyses, such as studies of productivity (Rørstad and Aksnes, 2015), collaboration (Ossenblok et al, 2014), concentration in publication channels (Sivertsen and Larsen, 2012), or internationalization of book publishing (Verleysen and Engels, 2014)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion