Is there a world beyond the Web of Science? Publication practices outside the heartland of academic geography

Abstract

Because research on the publication practices of academic geographers has been limited to the quantification of journal articles cited in easily searchable databases such as Thomson Reuters' Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, the question remains whether journals that are not indexed by these databases flourish or perish under the increasing pressure to publish in outlets with the highest impact factors. To answer this question, we have compiled a database with the complete bibliographies of all Belgian professors that have been working in Belgium in the field of human geography over the last 40 years. Based on our quantitative analysis of 810 articles published in 304 different journals, we come to the conclusion that human geographers from the Dutch-speaking north of the country are currently publishing more in English-language journals and in journals indexed by the Web of Science than their colleagues in the seventies or the eighties, but less in the Dutch and the French languages and in Belgian geographical journals. In the French-speaking south of the country, this evolution is less pronounced, but still present. Even though we applaud the tendency to publish in English and in Web of Science journals because it increases the academic rigour of scholarly research, we are afraid that it hampers the role of academic geography in geography education and society as a whole.

The scientometric evaluation of the research on the production of bioenergy from biomass

“…This is a very surprising result showing again the dominance of US institutions and researchers in this field. It is interesting to note that most of the papers were published by the English speaking authors, but the other authors as well published in English language journals since English was the preferred mode of scientific communication in this field [41].…”

Geography after Babel – a view from the French province

“…For the past decade, an international debate has addressed the internal diversity of geography as a discipline, a diversity that is at the same time national, linguistic, and conceptual (for instance, see Gutierrez and Lopez-Nieva, 2001;Braun et al, 2003;Garcia-Ramon, 2003;Aalbers, 2004;Aalbers and Rossi, 2007;Fall and Rosière, 2008;Schuermans et al, 2010;Bajerski, 2011;Bański and Ferenc, 2013). While early on, the discussion questioned Anglo 1 geography's international status, we agree with the call by Fall and Minca (2012) and others to reject simple binaries between Anglo geography and "other" geographies from the rest of the world.…”

Evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices

“…While the influence of metrics and the details of that scholarly common sense can vary significantly across contexts, the journals that matter in this way are most often published in English and included as part of Web of Science (WoS) rankings (cf. Schuermans et al 2010;Paasi 2013). This hierarchy of publishing outlets effectively narrows the kinds of approaches and contributions that are likely to be made.…”