From the Periphery to the Center of Global Knowledge Production? A Bibliometric Analysis of the Evolution of a Social Science Community from a Small Country: Austria

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis of the global presence of Austrian political science (104 senior political scientists) is based on Scopus and OCLC Worldcat. Our global market presence indicators are: the number of articles indexed in Scopus; the total number of quotations documented in Scopus; the H-Index according to Scopus; OCLC Worldcat: book with the largest global library presence; OCLC Worldcat: book with the second largest global library presence; OCLC Worldcat: book with the third largest global library presence. We also presented the results of a promax factor analysis of our data. We provide rankings of the global presence of Austrian political science according to the criteria used in this article. There is ample evidence of a successful publication strategy based on the international journals, indexed in Scopus and the diffusion of book titles in the global libraries, contained in the OCLC Worldcat by a significant proportion of the Austrian political science community. We introduce some measures of comparison of their performance with the German, Swiss, and American political science communities. Data from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Knowledge support our contentions, also over the time period of 1970-2019. Arguments against an international publication strategy, citing the global science enterprise as an international mode of power, are utterly wrong. We show that the relationship of the often invoked 'critical' political science and 'mainstream publishing' can be a positive one, discussing the example of current political transformations in Portugal, one of the few cases of a successful political left-wing project in Europe. There is no alternative to mainstream scientific publishing with major international journal and book publishers. Finally, we suggest that publishing with journals and book companies from emerging centers of publishing like the BRICS countries and in Eastern Europe can be also an attractive path for Austrian political science and for similar social science communities in the future.