Search

This study uses mixed methods—classical citation analysis, altmetric analysis, a survey with researchers as respondents, and text analysis of the abstracts of scientific articles—to investigate gender differences in the aims and impacts of research. We find that male researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at scientific progress, which is more cited. Female researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at contributing to societal progress, which has more abstract views (usage). The gender differences are observed among researchers who work in the same field of research and have the same age and academic position. Our findings have implications for evaluation and funding policies and practices. A critical discussion of how societal engagement versus citation impact is valued, and how funding criteria reflect gender differences, is warranted.

Internationalization is important for research quality and for specialization on new themes in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Interaction with society, however, is just as important in these areas of research for realizing the ultimate aims of knowledge creation. This article demonstrates how the heterogenous publishing patterns of the SSH may reflect and fulfill both purposes. The limited coverage of the SSH in Scopus and Web of Science is discussed along with ideas about how to achieve a more complete representation of all the languages and publication types that are actually used in the SSH. A dynamic and empirical concept of balanced multilingualism is introduced to support combined strategies for internationalization and societal interaction. The argument is that all the communication purposes in all different areas of research, and all the languages and publication types needed to fulfill these purposes, should be considered in a holistic manner without exclusions or priorities whenever research in the SSH is evaluated.

A radical reform of research assessment was recently launched in China. It seeks to replace a focus on Web of Science-based indicators with a balanced combination of qualitative and quantitative research evaluation, and to strengthen the local relevance of research in China. It trusts the institutions to implement the policy within a few months but does not provide the necessary national platforms for coordination, influence and collaboration on developing shared tools and information resources and for agreement on definitions, criteria and protocols for the procedures. Based on international experiences, this article provides constructive ideas for the implementation of the new policy. Policy highlights In response to the three main messages of the new policy, we suggest these possible solutions for the implementation: Farewell to “SCI worship”: With the move away from Web of Science as a standard, an integrated research information system and a national journal evaluation system is needed. From metrics to peer review: The function and weight of peer-review evaluation needs to be differentiated between the levels of the research system: individuals, units, institutions, and national agencies. New priority to local relevance: The optimal balance between globalization and local relevance must be allowed to differ by type and field of research.

Journal evaluation systems reflect how new insights are critically reviewed and published, and the prestige and impact of a discipline’s journals is a key metric in many research assessment, performance evaluation, and funding systems. With the expansion of China’s research and innovation systems and its rise as a major contributor to global innovation, journal evaluation has become an especially important issue. In this paper, we first describe the history and background of journal evaluation in China and then systematically introduce and compare the most currently influential journal lists and indexing services. These are the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), the Journal Partition Table (JPT), the AMI Comprehensive Evaluation Report (AMI), the Chinese S&T Journal Citation Report (CJCR), “A Guide to the Core Journals of China” (GCJC), the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), and the World Academic Journal Clout Index (WAJCI). Some other influential lists produced by government agencies, professional associations, and universities are also briefly introduced. Through the lens of these systems, we provide comprehensive coverage of the tradition and landscape of the journal evaluation system in China and the methods and practices of journal evaluation in China with some comparisons to how other countries assess and rank journals.

Funding information: National Science Centre in Poland, Grant/Award Number: UMO‐2017/26/E/HS2/00019; European Cooperation in Science and Technology, Grant/Award Number: CA15137; Slovenian Research Agency, Grant/Award Number: P2‐0210; Flemish Government We investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities (SSH) using a comprehensive data set of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Norway, Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages. We collected and analyzed a set of 164,218 peer‐reviewed journal articles (produced by 51,063 researchers from 2013 to 2015) and found that multilingualism is prevalent despite geographical location and field. Among the researchers who published at least three journal articles during this time period, over one‐third from the various countries had written their work in at least two languages. The highest share of researchers who published in only one language were from Flanders (80.9%), whereas the lowest shares were from Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%). Our findings show that multilingual publishing is an ongoing practice in many SSH research fields regardless of geographical location, political situation, and/or historical heritage. Here we argue that research is international, but multilingual publishing keeps locally relevant research alive with the added potential for creating impact.

This study compares publication pattern dynamics in the social sciences and humanities in five European countries. Three are Central and Eastern European countries that share a similar cultural and political heritage (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland). The other two are Flanders (Belgium) and Norway, representing Western Europe and the Nordics, respectively. We analysed 449,409 publications from 2013–2016 and found that, despite persisting differences between the two groups of countries across all disciplines, publication patterns in the Central and Eastern European countries are becoming more similar to those in their Western and Nordic counterparts. Articles from the Central and Eastern European countries are increasingly published in journals indexed in Web of Science and also in journals with the highest citation impacts. There are, however, clear differences between social science and humanities disciplines, which need to be considered in research evaluation and science policy.

In May 2016, an article published in Scientometrics, titled ‘Taking scholarly books into account: current developments in five European countries’, introduced a comparison of book evaluation schemes implemented within five European countries. The present article expands upon this work by including a broader and more heterogeneous set of countries (19 European countries in total) and adding new variables for comparison. Two complementary classification models were used to point out the commonalities and differences between each country’s evaluation scheme. First, we employed a double-axis classification to highlight the degree of ‘formalization’ for each scheme, second, we classified each country according to the presence or absence of a bibliographic database. Each country’s evaluation scheme possesses its own unique merits and details; however the result of this study was the identification of four main types of book evaluation systems, leading to the following main conclusions. First, countries may be differentiated on the basis of those that use a formalized evaluation system and those that do not. Also, countries that do use a formalized evaluation system either have a supra-institutional database, quality labels for publishers and/or publisher rankings in place to harmonize the evaluations. Countries that do not use a formalized system tend to rely less on quantitative evaluation procedures. Each evaluation type has its advantages and disadvantages; therefore an exchange between countries might help to generate future improvements., This article is based upon work from ENRESSH (European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and Humanities, COST Action (CA15137)), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)

Purpose The purpose of this study is to assess the coverage of the scientific literature in Scopus and Web of Science from the perspective of research evaluation. Design/methodology/approach The academic communities of Norway have agreed on certain criteria for what should be included as original research publications in research evaluation and funding contexts. These criteria have been applied since 2004 in a comprehensive bibliographic database called the Norwegian Science Index (NSI). The relative coverages of Scopus and Web of Science are compared with regard to publication type, field of research and language. Findings Our results show that Scopus covers 72 percent of the total Norwegian scientific and scholarly publication output in 2015 and 2016, while the corresponding figure for Web of Science Core Collection is 69 percent. The coverages are most comprehensive in medicine and health (89 and 87 percent) and in the natural sciences and technology (85 and 84 percent). The social sciences (48 percent in Scopus and 40 percent in Web of Science Core Collection) and particularly the humanities (27 and 23 percent) are much less covered in the two international data sources. Research limitation Comparing with data from only one country is a limitation of the study, but the criteria used to define a country’s scientific output as well as the identification of patterns of field-dependent partial representations in Scopus and Web of Science should be recognizable and useful also for other countries. Originality/value The novelty of this study is the criteria-based approach to studying coverage problems in the two data sources.

This article investigates the developments during the last decades in the use of languages, publication types and publication channels in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The purpose is to develop an understanding of the processes of internationalization and to apply this understanding in a critical examination of two often used general criteria in research evaluations in the SSH. One of them is that the coverage of a publication in Scopus or Web of Science is seen in itself as an expression of research quality and of internationalization. The other is that a specific international language, English, and a specific type of publication, journal articles, are perceived as supreme in a general hierarchy of languages and publication types. Simple distinctions based on these criteria are contrary to the heterogeneous publication patterns needed in the SSH to organize their research adequately, present their results properly, reach their audiences efficiently, and thereby fulfil their missions. Research quality, internationalization, and societal relevance can be promoted in research assessment in the SSH without categorical hierarchies of publications. I will demonstrate this by using data from scholarly publishing in the SSH that go beyond the coverage in the commercial data sources in order to give a more comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing in the SSH.

The “Norwegian Model” attempts to comprehensively cover all the peer-reviewed scholarly literatures in all areas of research in one single weighted indicator. Thereby, scientific production is made comparable across departments and faculties within and between research institutions, and the indicator may serve institutional evaluation and funding. This article describes the motivation for creating the model in Norway, how it was designed, organized and implemented, as well as the effects and experiences with the model. The article ends with an overview of a new type of bibliometric studies that are based on the type of comprehensive national publication data that the Norwegian Model provides.

The scientific performance of mobile and non-mobile researchers is analysed using publication and citation indicators in a study of more than 11,000 Norwegian university researchers. Two types of mobility are investigated: change of work place during the scientific career and mobility from an academic institution granting the highest degree to another work place for the scientific career. The study shows that mobile researchers tend to have slightly higher publication and citation rates than other researchers, but the results are not unambiguous.

The scientific foundation for the criticism on the use of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in evaluations of individual researchers and their publications was laid between 1989 and 1997 in a series of articles by Per O. Seglen. His basic work has since influenced initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics, and The Metric Tide review on the role of metrics in research assessment and management. Seglen studied the publications of only 16 senior biomedical scientists. We investigate whether Seglen's main findings still hold when using the same methods for a much larger group of Norwegian biomedical scientists with more than 18,000 publications. Our results support and add new insights to Seglen's basic work. ispartof: PLoS One vol:12 issue:3 ispartof: location:United States status: published

In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the noncommercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on highly selective procedures by which the coverage concentrates on prestigious international publishers, mainly based in the USA or UK and serving the natural sciences, engineering, and medicine.

A well-designed and comprehensive citation index for the social sciences and humanities has many potential uses, but has yet to be realised. Significant parts of the scholarly production in these areas are not published in international journals, but in national scholarly journals, in book chapters or in monographs. The potential for covering these literatures more comprehensively can now be investigated empirically using a complete publication output data set from the higher education sector of an entire country (Norway). We find that while the international journals in the social sciences and humanities are rather small and more dispersed in specialties, representing a large but not unlimited number of outlets, the domestic journal publishing, as well as book publishing on both the international and domestic levels, show a concentration of many publications in few publication channels. These findings are promising for a more comprehensive coverage of the social sciences and humanities.

Numerous studies have shown that female scientists tend to publish significantly fewer publications than do their male colleagues. In this study, we have analyzed whether similar differences also can be found in terms of citation rates. Based on a large-scale study of 8,500 Norwegian researchers and more than 37,000 publications covering all areas of knowledge, we conclude that the publications of female researchers are less cited than are those of men, although the differences are not large. The gender differences in citation rates can be attributed to differences in productivity. There is a cumulative advantage effect of increasing publication output on citation rates. Since the women in our study publish significantly fewer publications than do men, they benefit less from this effect. The study also provides results on how publication and citation rates vary according to scientific position, age, and discipline. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Background and purpose: A new national system for funding research in universities and hospitals in Norway based on publication output is described. Methods: All scientific publications were counted and weighted according to the quality of the publication channel. Author addresses were credited. This led to a number of publication points for each institution/department. Results: The number of publication points for neurology had increased from 75.0 in 2005 to 98.3 in 2007. Publishing and the quality of publications were given more attention than before, and there was a stronger focus on facilitating research at the institutions. Research was regarded as not only an institutional but also as an individual responsibility. Conclusions: The principle of performance-based funding in addition to funding based on project applications has been well received, and it stimulates more and better research. Scientific publications represent a useful marker, whereas the way of counting author addresses and determining quality is still debated.

University rankings are typically presenting their results as league tables with more emphasis on final scores and positions, than on the clarification of why the universities are ranked as they are. Finding out the latter is often not possible, because final scores are based on weighted indicators where raw data and the processing of these are not publically available. In this study we use a sample of Scandinavian universities, explaining what is causing differences between them in the two most influential university rankings: Times Higher Education and the Shanghai-ranking. The results show that differences may be attributed to both small variations on what we believe are not important indicators, as well as substantial variations on what we believe are important indicators. The overall aim of this paper is to provide a methodology that can be used in understanding universities' different ranks in global university rankings.

The ‘Norwegian Model’ attempts to comprehensively cover all the peer-reviewed scholarly literatures in all areas of research—including the preferred formats and languages of scholarly publishing in the humanities—in one single weighted indicator which makes the research efforts comparable across departments and faculties within and between research institutions. This article describes the main components of the model and how it has been implemented, as well as the effects and experiences in three of the countries that are making use of the model, and where it has been evaluated: Belgium (Flanders), Denmark and Norway. The article concludes with a discussion of the model from the perspective of the humanities.

A large part of the scholarly journal articles from the humanities and social sciences at Norwegian research institutions are published in a small number of national or common Nordic journals. Many of these journals are sponsored by the Research Council of Norway on the national or Nordic level. The institutions that mainly contribute to the contents of the journals are also the main subscribers. The journals can be made open to society with only marginal extra costs for the institutions themselves and the sponsor.

A growing science policy interest in international scientific collaboration has brought about a multitude of studies which attempt to measure the extent of international scientific collaboration between countries and to explore intercountry collaborative networks. This paper attempts to clarify the methodology that is being used or can be used for this purpose and discusses the adequacy of the methods. The paper concludes that, in an analysis of collaborative links, it is essential to use both absolute and relative measures. The latter normalize differences in country size. Each yields a different type of information. Absolute measures yield an answer to questions such as which countries are central in the international network of science, whether collaborative links reveal a centre — periphery relationship, and which countries are the most important collaborative partners of another country. Relative measures provide answers to questions of the intensity of collaborative links.

International scientific collaboration has increased both in volume and importance. In this article, the authors study the interpretation of macro-level data on international co authorship collaboration. They address such questions as how one might explain country- to-country differences in the rates of international coauthorship, networks of interna tional scientific collaboration among countries, and patterns of international collaboration in scientific fields. Attention is drawn to cognitive, social, historical, geopolitical, and economic factors as potential determinants of the observed patterns. They present a methodology that gives one a measure, independent of size, of countries'propensities to collaborate internationally.