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Similar to its economy CEE science finds itself on a semiperiphery, with occasional breakthroughs towards the core of global science. We analyse CEE journals as one of the main carriers of academic reputation of this region. In contrast to leading Western social science journals that are predominantly published by major publishing houses (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon, 2015), leading journals in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe are mostly published by national academic institutions. This paper presents results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of social science journals indexed in Scopus and based in one of the 13 European post-socialist countries (Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Macedonia). The classification of these journals based on their disciplinary orientation and type of publisher is presented and compared with the classification of social science journals from these countries that are indexed in Urlichsweb. Semi-structured interviews with current or former editors-in-chief of social science journals indexed in Scopus are used in order to place them within a broader social and scientific context. We investigate how these journals attempt to achieve a more prominent role in the highly competitive world of scientific journals and why they fail or succeed. Social science journals’ missions, orientations and survival strategies are categorised and compared. Also these journals forge different transnational networks within but also outside the European research area.

In this paper we were trying to analyze how Scopus subject categories of journals can influence processing and use of bibliographic data in bibliometric or scientometric research. The sample for this research was obtained from Scopus database as a result of the search strategies of scientific productivity and citations of social scientists from 15 European post-socialist countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia) for the period 1996-2013. The sample consisted of bibliographic records of 83, 059 papers published in 4, 896 journals. Each of 4, 896 journals, classified to social sciences according to Scopus' subject categories, was analysed and reclassified according to OECD- based Croatian classification of social sciences, by a subject specialists. The results of reclassification process were huge decreased, in number of journals, from initial 4, 896 it fell to 2, 744 titles, as well as number of papers (N=35653 papers), to only 42.9% of the initial number. In addition to a significantly smaller number of papers and journals, there are significant differences in the citations count. The obtained results confirm Wang & Waltman (2016) thesis that the accuracy of a classification system can seriously influence bibliometric studies.