Abstract
Monographs and edited books are important in scholarly communication, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities. An edited book is a collection of chapters written by different authors, gathered and harmonized by one or more editors. This article analyses the characteristics and collaboration patterns of edited books in the Social Sciences and Humanities as practiced in Flanders, the Northern Dutch speaking part of Belgium. It is based upon a comprehensive set of 753 peer reviewed edited books, of which at least one of the editors has a Flemish university affiliation, and the 12,913 chapters published therein. The article analyses various characteristics of edited books, i.e. the distribution over publishers, the places of publication, language use, the presence of introductions and conclusions, the occurrence of co-editorship and co-authorship, and the number of unique authors and book chapters per volume. Almost half of the edited books are published with about 5 % of the publishers. English is the dominant publication language for all places of publication. Writing a conclusion seems rather uncommon. All in all, about 90 % of all volumes are co-edited. Edited books in the Social Sciences have a more diverse authorship then edited books in the Humanities. In general, the more co-authorship for articles occurs within a discipline, the more co-authorship occurs for book chapters, whereas the number of editors is independent from this trend.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
To be able to calculate the independent-samples Kruskal–Wallis test, all records belonging to more than one discipline (#27) were left out (i.e. defined as missing). When calculating the independent-samples Kruskal–Wallis test including the records belonging to more than one discipline (i.e. duplicating the records for each of its corresponding disciplines), the results remain overall the same but show a lower significant level for number of editors per book (#chapters/book: sign .000; # unique authors/book: sign .000; # authors/book. sign .000; # editors/book: sign .005).
References
Ajiferuke, I., Burell, Q., & Tague, J. (1988). Collaborative coefficient: A single measure of the degree of collaboration in research. Scientometrics, 14, 421–433.
Beaver, D. D. (2001). Reflections in scientific collaboration (and its study): Past, present and future. Scientometrics, 52, 365–377.
Bukova, H. (2010). Studying research collaboration: A literature review. Sprouts Working Papers on Information Systems (Vol. 10). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/10-3
Derricourt, R. (2012). Peer review: Fetishes, fallacies and perceptions. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 43, 137–147.
Didegah, F., & Thelwall, M. (2013). Which factors help authors produce the highest impact research? Collaboration, journal and document properties. Journal of Informetrics, 7, 861–873.
Edwards, L. (2012). Editing academic books in the humanities and social sciences: Maximizing impact for effort. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 44, 61–74.
Egghe, L. (1991). Theory of collaboration and collaborative measures. Information Processing and Management, 27, 177–202.
Engels, T. C. E., Ossenblok, T. L. B., & Spruyt, E. H. J. (2012). Changing publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities, 2000–2009. Scientometrics, 93, 373–390.
Galanter, M. (2008). A guide for preparation of an academic edited book. Substance abuse, 29, 1–4.
Gold, D. (1999). A tapestry of kings: Edited volumes and the growth of knowledge in religious studies. Religion, 29, 243–259.
Gorraiz, J., Purnell, P. J., & Glänzel, W. (2013). Opportunities and limitations of the Book Citation Index. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64, 1388–1398.
Harnad, S. (1986). On reviewing (and publising in) edited interdisciplinary volumes. Contemporary psychology, 31, 390.
Heumann, L. (2001). Growth of edited volumes. Journal of the American Planning Association, 67, 467–468.
Hicks, D. (2004). The four literatures of social science. In H. F. Moed, W. Glänzel, & U. Schmoch (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative Science and Technology Research: The use of publication and patent statistics in studies of S&T systems (pp. 473–496). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Ingwersen, P., & Larsen, B. (2014). Influence of a performance indicator on Danish research production and citation impact 2000–12. Scientometrics, 101, 1325–1344.
Katz, J. S., & Martin, B. R. (1997). What is research collaboration? Research Policy, 26, 1–18.
Laudel, G. (2002). What do we measure by co-authorship? Research Evaluation, 11, 3–15.
Leal, D. L. (2013). Chapters, volumes, editors! Oh my! Reassessing the role of edited volumes in the social sciences. Political Science and Politics, 46, 380–382.
Lewis, R. (1996). Books with multiple contributors present multiple editing challenges. The Scientist, 10, 15.
Leydesdorff, L., & Felt, U. (2012). Edited volumes, monographs and book chapters in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) and Science Citation Index (SCI, SoSCI, A&HCI). Journal of Scientometric Research, 1, 28–34.
Melin, G., & Persson, O. (1996). Studying research collaboration using co-authorships. Scientometrics, 36, 363–377.
Nederhof, A. J. (2006). Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the social sciences and the humanities: A review. Scientometrics, 66, 81–100.
Nederman, C. J. (2005). Herding cats: The view from the volume and series editor. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 36, 221–228.
Ossenblok, T. L. B., Verleysen, F. T., & Engels, T. C. E. (2014). Co-authorship of journal articles and book chapters in the social sciences and humanities (2000–2010). Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65, 882–897.
Ossenblok, T. L. B., Verleysen, F. T., Spruyt, E. H. J., & Engels, T. C. E. (2013). Bibliometrische analyse van het Vlaamse universitaire onderzoek in de sociale en humane wetenschappen aan de hand van het VABB-SHW. In K. Debackere & R. Veugelers (Eds.), Vlaams indicatorenboek (pp. 91–103). Brussel: Expertisecentrum Onderzoek & Ontwikkelingsmonitoring (ECOOM), Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap.
Puuska, H.-M., Muhonnen, R., & Leino, Y. (2014). International and domestic co-publishing and their citation impact in different disciplines. Scientometrics, 98, 823–839.
Rousseau, R. (2011). Comments on the modified collaborative coefficient. Scientometrics, 87, 171–174.
Sivertsen, G. (2010). A performance indicator based on complete data for the scientific publication output at research institutions. ISSI Newsletter, 6, 22–28.
Sula, C. A. (2012). Visualizing social connections in the humanities: Beyond bibliometrics. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 38, 31–35.
Thomas, C. S., & Hrebenar, R. J. (1993). Editing multiauthor books in political science: Plotting your way through an academic minefield. Political Science and Politics, 26, 778–783.
Thompson, J. B. (2005). Books in the digital age. The transformation of academic and higher education publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: Polity.
Torres-Salinas, D., Robinson-Garcia, N., Cabezas-Clavijo, Á., & Jiménez-Contreras, E. (2013). Analyzing the citation characteristics of books: Edited books, book series and publisher types in the Book Citation Index. Scientometrics, 98, 2113–2127.
Verleysen, F. T., & Engels, T. C. E. (2014a). Barycenter representation of book publishing internationalization in the social sciences and humanities. Journal of Informetrics, 8, 234–240.
Verleysen, F. T., & Engels, T. C. E. (2014b). Internationalization of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed book publications in the social sciences and humanities. Scientometrics, 101, 1431–1444.
Verleysen, F. T., Ghesquière, P., & Engels, T. C. E. (2014). The objectives, design and selection process of the Flemish Academic Bibliographic Database for the Social Sciences and Humanities (VABB-SHW). In W. Blockmans, et al. (Eds.), The use and abuse of bibliometrics (pp. 115–125). London: Academiae Europaea; Portland Press.
Verleysen, F. T., Ossenblok, T. L. B., Spruyt, E. H. J., & Engels, T. C. E. (2015). Bibliometrische analyse van het Vlaamse universitaire onderzoek in de sociale en humane wetenschappen aan de hand van het VABB-SHW. In K. Debackere & R. Veugelers (Eds.), Vlaams indicatiorenboek 2015. Brussel: Expertisecentrum Onderzoek & Ontwikkelingsmonitioring (ECOOM), Ministerie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank all colleagues who helped in setting up the VABB-SHW database. We are also grateful to the Flemish Government for providing an adequate legal framework and funding. All the same we thank Lynn Elshof, Robin Houben and Hélène Veragten for helping with the construction of the additional data set. Finally we thank our colleagues Nick Deschacht, Raf Guns, Ronald Rousseau and Frederik Verleysen for useful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
See Table 5.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ossenblok, T.L.B., Engels, T.C.E. Edited books in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Characteristics and collaboration analysis. Scientometrics 104, 219–237 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1544-3
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1544-3