Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from eight European countries

This study aims to advance the knowledge regarding social sciences and humanities (SSH) publication patterns in Europe. National studies on SSH research outputs in Finland (Puuska 2014), Flanders (Engels et al. 2012; Verleysen et al. 2014), and Norway (Sivertsen 2016a) have reported stable patterns in terms of publication type; however, in terms of publication language, academic work is gradually leaning toward greater use of English. Van Leeuwen (2006) reported similar patterns of referencing non-Institute for Scientific Information-covered sources among social scientists from six different countries. Furthermore, Sivertsen (2016a) suggests that, although publication patterns differ between SSH disciplines, these patterns are rather similar within SSH disciplines across different countries. However, very few cross-country comparative studies of SSH publication patterns have been conducted. Moreover, these studies have focused on West European and Nordic countries (e.g. Nordforsk 2018; Ossenblok et al. 2012; Pölönen et al. 2017a). In this study, we add Central and Eastern European countries, which have undergone various academic transformations over the past three decades, following the breakdown of Communist regimes (Kozak et al. 2014; Kwiek 2014).

All the analysed countries are non-English speaking countries. However, in terms of the scholars working there, internationalization in these countries varies in many ways. For instance, in Finland, the share of foreign academic staff in Finnish universities has increased in SSH fields from 8% of the full-time equivalent in 2010 to 12% in 2016 (Vipunen 2017). In the Czech Republic in 2011, less than 10% of researchers overall were foreign, and half of those were Slovaks (Arnold 2011), whereas the share of foreign academic staff in Polish universities was 2.5% in 2016 (PAP Nauka w Polsce 2017).

Our study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that in non-English speaking countries, patterns in the language and type of SSH publications are related not only to the norms, culture, and expectations of each SSH discipline but also to each country’s specific cultural and historic heritage. The starting point for this study are the results of a previous study we conducted, which were presented at the ISSI 2017 conference in Wuhan, China (Kulczycki et al. 2017a). In this previous study, we investigated all peer-reviewed SSH publications from the 2009–2014 period in Flanders (Belgium) and Poland. In the present study, SSH publication data from eight European countries are included.

We have analysed all scholarly SSH publications for the 2011–2014 period written by academics affiliated with higher education institutions or research institutes from eight European countries: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders (Belgium), Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Though the presence of SSH publications in databases like Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) has grown—and though, as a result, various research evaluation systems have come to use this presence as a criterion of productivity—these citation databases have limited coverage of scholarly SSH publications from non-English speaking countries (Sivertsen 2014). Therefore, to develop a broader picture of publication patterns in Europe, we examine the peer-reviewed publications registered in national publication databases, which offer an almost complete representation of scholarly SSH publications within their respective countries. We begin by characterizing these databases and defining various publication types and inclusion criteria. Next, we briefly explain how the databases classify publications into fields and disciplines. Then we describe the data and methods, as well as our findings regarding SSH publication patterns in terms of language and type. We conclude by discussing and interpreting the results in a broader context.

Below, we describe the design and content of the eight national databases. Moreover, we present the InCites Dataset, which is used to compare the coverage degree between the WoS and the national databases.

In six databases (RIV in the Czech Republic, BFI in Denmark, VIRTA in Finland, NSI in Norway, CREPČ in Slovakia, and COBISS in Slovenia), publications are assigned to disciplines according to a cognitive classification, mostly the OECD Fields of Science classification or a refined version thereof. This means that the assignment of publications to disciplines is based on the content of publications or journals in which papers were published. In Flanders and Poland, publications are assigned according to the organizational structure of the higher education institutions to which the authors of the publications are affiliated. In this way, all publications of a researcher working at some law faculty are assigned to the law discipline. In Denmark, bibliographic information about publication types and publication languages within the disciplines was not collected for the period analysed in this study. Therefore, the Danish data are not used in the comparison on the discipline level. Slovakia uses discipline classification, which allows for differentiation of SSH from other fields from 2014 onwards. Thus, only the 2014 data can be used for Slovakia. In the WoS, publications are assigned to disciplines and fields according to a cognitive classification, which is mapped to the OECD FOS classification.

Our findings show that publication patterns differ both across fields (e.g. law differs from economics and business in the same way in Flanders and Finland) and across countries (e.g. publication patterns for law in the Czech Republic differ from those for law in Finland). The advantage of using national publication databases as our data source is that we can analyse the total peer-reviewed SSH publication volume for eight countries and hence go beyond the coverage of databases like Scopus or the WoS. This is essential, in order to, as the findings of Part B in the results section show, obtain a comprehensive overview of a country’s SSH output.

Our study had two main limitations. First, our study uses data from national databases which are based on different classification systems (cognitive versus organizational). This may have biased the results on the discipline level and for the comparison between the national databases and the WoS. Currently, however, analysing the total SSH volume in non-English speaking countries is possible only in this way, i.e. on the basis of national databases. Guns et al. (2017) have analysed the discrepancy between these two ways of classifying publications in the social sciences and humanities. They show that, in the VABB-SHW, 70% of publications from the humanities are published in humanities journals, while only 53% of publications from the social sciences are published in social sciences journals. Additionally, the types of institutions and personnel reporting to those national databases are different across countries. For example, for Flanders data are collected only from universities, whereas in Slovakia only full-time academics report their publications.

Second, we analyse statistics of the peer-reviewed SSH publications regardless of the quality of those publications. In terms of peer review processes, we have taken the collection of those publications that have been marked as peer reviewed at face value for each of the eight countries. We know, however, that peer review comes in many different forms (Lee et al. 2013) and is not determined uniformly across each of the eight databases (e.g. for NSI, authors themselves first indicate whether a publication is peer reviewed or not, whereas in Flanders a central panel decides on the peer review status of publication channels). Even for the same publications channels, these different approaches may lead to differences in terms of peer review status across countries (Pölönen et al. 2017b). Moreover, in terms of quality of publications we measure neither the impact nor the citations of the publications, and we do not analyse whether the growth in terms of number of articles is related to the growth of articles published in top-tier journals or societal impact. Our primary aim is to provide a broader picture of SSH productivity in European countries. Nonetheless, we believe that the quality and impact of the SSH publications used for this analysis is a topic that requires further investigation.

Publication patterns are rooted in scholarly traditions, as the relatively stable cases of Denmark, Finland, Flanders, and Norway show. However, our analysis reveals that discipline-level publication patterns differ more across countries than Sivertsen (2016a) and van Leeuwen (2006) initially suggested. It appears that similarities between disciplines depend not only on the analogies within disciplines but also on the similarities between countries. In comparing the publication patterns from eight European countries, we observed few similarities for comparison at either the country level or the discipline level.

In general, our findings revealed two publication pattern characteristics that should be interpreted in a broader context. The first publication pattern characteristic relates to the proportions of publication types, which appear relatively stable in Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Norway, and Slovenia but were subject to significant change in the Czech Republic and Poland, especially in terms of the share of monographs. Since 2011, in Poland, the proportion of articles has increased, whereas the proportion of chapters has decreased. The number of monographs has decreased significantly as well. An interpretation of these changes is possible when we identify the main underlying mechanisms. In Poland, the regulations for both the performance-based research funding system and for academic promotions changed considerably from 2009 to 2014 (Kulczycki 2017). Furthermore, science policy in Poland has increasingly provided incentives for publishing articles and for publishing in English (Kulczycki et al. 2017b). As for the Czech Republic, the decrease of monographs in 2012 can be interpreted by the change of the evaluation regulations (i.e. Evaluation Methodology) in 2013. In each evaluation year, outputs from the previous year are assessed. Based on these regulations, books and chapters became the subject of panel review. Consequently, many publications were excluded from the database, as they were recognized by panels as inappropriate or even fraudulent according to the definition of the publication type. In the next few years, researchers adopted new conditions and the number of books rose again. The overall ratio of number of books and articles in journals can be interpreted in the context of strategic balancing between the expected number of points in the national evaluation and the effort put in publishing in certain publication channels. Our findings point to the possibility that these policies have achieved some of their intended effects. However, we have not analysed the quality of the articles, for example, in terms of publication channel (e.g. top-tier journals indexed in Scopus or the WoS). In other words, what unintended and constitutive effects have occurred remains to be studied.

Another publication pattern and characteristic that requires further attention is related to the publication languages, and in particular, publications that are written in English. Both on the aggregate level and on the discipline level, we found patterns that similarly divided the analysed countries into three groups. In Denmark, Finland, Flanders, and Norway, the majority of the peer-reviewed publications appear in English. In the Czech Republic and Slovenia, publications in English constitute a lower share of the total volume. In Poland, publications written in English constitute the smallest share of all SSH publications from all the analysed countries. However, in all countries at the aggregate level, the growth of English language publications is observed.

The share of publications in English can be interpreted, among other perspectives, in the light of the size of the scientific community in the given countries. In our study, we have analysed eight countries, which were chosen on the basis of data availability. Our initial goal was to analyse all European countries which collect the bibliographic records for all SSH peer-reviewed publications at the national level. In the final dataset, there are six countries whose populations do not exceed 7 million citizens (i.e. Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Norway, Slovakia, and Slovenia). The Czech Republic has 10.5 million citizens, and Poland has 38 million citizens. The size of the population and the size of scholarly community may be important explanatory factors of publication patterns. The ‘local’ market of academic output may be very different depending on the number of people speaking the local language and the number of small local publishers. However, some local languages are also the local language in other countries (e.g. Dutch in the Netherlands), and in some contexts, it is common for researchers to be able to read each other’s publications in the local language because the languages are similar (e.g. Danish and Norwegian).

Poland is one of the biggest European countries (and the largest among the countries analysed in this study). Our findings show that Polish SSH scholars are comparatively less internationally oriented in their publication patterns in terms of writing in English. However, prior to 1989 Polish SSH scholars used to be international. Following a massive expansion of the higher education sector after 1989, Polish SSH scholars lost much of their international research visibility (Kwiek 2014). Smaller countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Slovenia, with local languages which are not commonly used in other countries, have only small local audiences for scholarly publications in the local language. Thus, scholars from these countries need to be more international in their publication practices from the onset. For instance, Denmark, Finland, Flanders, and Norway have a long tradition of being international in their scholarly publication patterns. They also have a strong tradition of being nationally relevant in research and using the national language, particularly in the SSH. In contrast, however, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia are also small countries, but their internationalization patterns are not similar to those in Denmark, Norway, Finland, or Flanders. Thus, (1) the size of a country and the size of its scientific community may contribute to differences in publication patterns only to some extent, and (2) differences in publication patterns within disciplines in various countries are determined not only by, among other factors, disciplines themselves and the size of countries and scientific communities, but also by the cultural and historical heritage of those countries. Hence, by analysing publications that are written in English, we seek further explanatory factors beyond the disciplines.

An even more important explanatory factor, however, may be the respective 20^th century histories of the analysed countries. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, Russian was a compulsory language at school prior to 1989, and, from a researcher’s point of view, publishing in English was not the best way to communicate research results. Before the achievement of Slovenian independence in 1991, in former Yugoslavia, the Slovene language was one of the official languages. The share of publications in other official languages (Serbian and Croatian) was significant. Since then, in those countries other languages became more prevalent (mostly English and German).

However, SSH scholars from the majority of the Central and Eastern European countries still traditionally investigate only local topics and read and use publications mostly from national or regional journals and publishers. Before 1989, science in former communist countries was strongly politicized. Under communist regimes, all public accountability systems were subordinated to party accountability (Balázs et al. 1995). Therefore, party loyalty was necessary for academic promotions and professional successes. Also, some specificities of the structure of the R&D system stem from the communist period. The research and higher education systems are still characterised by a split between the Academies of Sciences (e.g. the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Polish Academy of Sciences) and university systems, though the two entities increasingly collaborate (Heinecke 2017). The situation in Central and Eastern European countries before and after 1989 may still contribute to the current publication practices in economics and business, which as an academic discipline is substantially less internationally oriented in those countries than in the other countries that were examined in this study. In the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, economics and business served as one of the main tools of the central planning economy for domestic purposes. After 1989, economics and business had to face other domestic challenges of the transformation from central planning to (turbo) capitalism (Papava 2005).

The transformations of publication patterns are also shaped by science policy and the incentives created by research evaluation systems. As mentioned earlier, large-scale reforms in science and higher education systems in Poland created incentives for publishing in English and choosing articles as a publication type. Some incentives can also be observed in other countries. In the Czech Republic, publication patterns and publication languages may be in general (not only in SSH) directly influenced by the national evaluation system, which influences 100% of the core funding of research from the state budget. The Czech evaluation system encourages Scopus and WoS journals and proceedings. An article published in a top international journal obtains several times more points than an article published in a journal that concerns “national” fields (e.g. law), focuses on local topics, and is written in Czech (Good et al. 2015). An analogous situation may be observed in Slovakia. In Denmark, the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator has not been implemented in order to incentivize the Danish authors to publish in English, and while only 9% of the Danish publication channels on the BFI list of series are on the higher level 2, there is no Danish publisher listed at this level. This results in only 11% of the publications in SSH written in Danish being on level 2 in 2014. These levels are chosen by the researchers themselves through the Academic Committee and expert panels, which indicates that the Danish authors in SSH are either already focusing on publishing in English or have an external incentive to publish in English.

In Finland, in 2010–2012, 1% of the annual block grant for universities was allocated on the basis of “international refereed publications”, and 0.7% of the grant was allocated on basis of other publications. In 2013–2014 the share of international refereed publications increased to 9%, and that of other publications increased to 4%. This model promoted international publishing, as refereed journal and book publications published in Finland were counted among other publications together with non-refereed output in international outlets. Since 2015, Finland adopted the Norwegian model, in which the weight of publications depends on the publication channel rating (Giménez-Toledo et al. 2016). This model provides incentives for publishing in the national languages, as the majority of peer-reviewed publications in Finnish and English language channels are given equal weight at level 1 of the three-tier rating system. In Finland, 22 SSH publication series and three book publishers publishing in national language are also rated as level 2 (Pölönen 2015). Universities are also required under the Universities Act to evaluate their research activities and report the results publicly. Each university decides how it conducts the evaluation and if publication indicators are used. Although some universities use citation analysis or local publication data to inform expert panels, it is unlikely that research evaluation exercises in Finland would affect publication type and/or language selection on the national level (Wang et al. 2014). The Academy of Finland, the main research funding organization in Finland, traditionally uses panels of foreign experts to evaluate applications. In the long term, this practice may have put pressure on SSH researchers to produce more international output profiles (Väyrynen 2006).

In Flanders, the performance-based funding system started out (in 2003) with publications indexed in the WoS only. This may have driven researchers towards the WoS (Ossenblok et al. 2012). In the Norwegian model, the state allocates less than 2% of the total expenses in the higher education sector (Sivertsen 2016b). Thus, the Norwegian publication indicator attracts attention from researchers because it links directly to their publication practices. In Slovakia, regulations for assessing publications are directly connected to the funds allocation (Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic 2017). Therefore, there are direct incentives for researchers to shift their publication outputs towards those types of publications that are within their capacity and allow them to earn more money. In Slovenia, the research evaluation system considers publications indexed in Scopus or the WoS (Science Citation Index Expanded). The small size of the research sector in Slovenia results in a low number of publications indexed in these two international databases. However, the social sciences and humanities exhibited the largest growth in international publications from 1998 to 2005 (Sorčan et al. 2008).

The findings presented in this study have practical and policy implications. The internationalization policies in non-English speaking countries should be designed with consideration of current publication patterns. Western and Northern European countries have different starting points than Central and Eastern European countries. Scholars in the former group of countries are more rooted in their disciplines internationally and belong more often to a world-wide scholarly community than scholars from the latter group of countries. The Czech and Polish cases illustrate that it may be easy to change publication practices by providing incentives for scholars to publish in more locally oriented scholarly channels. This means that science policy could have strong—both positive and negative—consequences for the researchers’ behaviour. Our results show that in the majority of countries, less than 50% of SSH publications is visible in WoS. Hence, science policies oriented to university rankings may be interested in developing incentives which will push scholars to publish in journals indexed in Scopus and/or the WoS. However, providing such incentives, though desirable from some science policy points of view, could have negative consequences for SSH publication patterns. As we show, SSH scholars published many monographs and chapters which are not included (with some exceptions in the Book Citation Index) in Scopus or the WoS. Our findings follow results presented by Sivertsen and Larsen (2012), who provided empirical evidence that a robust bibliometric database for assessing the impact of all types of research output in SSH is needed. Thus, we suggest that the role of national databases, which cover all publication channels important for the SSH, should be increased in research evaluation systems, funding-schemes, and university rankings.