Coverage and overlap of the new social sciences and humanities journal lists

Abstract

This is a study of coverage and overlap in secondgeneration social sciences and humanities journal lists, with attention paid to curation and the judgment of scholarliness. We identify four factors underpinning coverage shortfalls: journal language, country, publisher size, and age. Analyzing these factors turns our attention to the process of assessing a journal as scholarly, which is a necessary foundation for every list of scholarly journals. Although scholarliness should be a quality inherent in the journal, coverage falls short because groups assessing scholarliness have different perspectives on the social sciences and humanities literature. That the four factors shape perspectives on the literature points to a deeper problem of fragmentation within the scholarly community. We propose reducing this fragmentation as the best method to reduce coverage shortfalls.

Internationalization of academic journals: Is there still a gap between social and natural sciences?

“…Generally, social scientists have more incentives to publish in national languages and in national journals, to participate in local conferences and so on. Meanwhile all the prominent citation databases are biased towards English-language literature, and although they keep expanding their coverage of literature in other languages, there is still a considerable disparity in representation, which affects the indicators of scholars from non-English speaking countries de Moya-Anegon et al 2007;Hicks and Wang 2011).…”

“…Sometimes to compare the databases authors calculate the share of national or institutional bibliography covered by these databases (Norris and Oppenheim 2007). Another type of methodology is database overlap analysis (Norris and Oppenheim 2007;Vieira and Gomes 2009;Hicks and Wang 2011). The third approach is to compare the database to some comprehensive source of bibliography, such as Ulrich's database for journal literature de Moya-Anegon et al 2007;Hicks and Wang 2011).…”

“…Hicks and Wang (2011) pointed out several types of methodology used in these studies. Sometimes to compare the databases authors calculate the share of national or institutional bibliography covered by these databases (Norris and Oppenheim 2007).…”

“…Another type of methodology is database overlap analysis (Norris and Oppenheim 2007;Vieira and Gomes 2009;Hicks and Wang 2011). The third approach is to compare the database to some comprehensive source of bibliography, such as Ulrich's database for journal literature de Moya-Anegon et al 2007;Hicks and Wang 2011). When these methods were applied to analyze international citation databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar) from the perspective of SSH research evaluation, in most studies their coverage was claimed to be wanting, with scarce coverage of books and national/linguistic disparity as the weak points.…”

El European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) como criterio de calidad de las revistas académicas: análisis de la lista revisada de educación

“…En este sentido se trata de una iniciativa loable que pretende superar las limitaciones de esos indicadores, y en parte remediar la buena infraestructura bibliométrica que requieren las evaluaciones de la investigación (Hicks & Wang, 2011).…”