Readership of Educational Science Journals

Abstract

Readership is a necessary part of scientific communication and is important both in terms of internal science communication and for transfer performance into politics and society. Based on findings from a scientometric analysis, we have shown that the correlations between download numbers and citation numbers in educational research are strongly dependent on the journal. These correlations could not be shown across all journals, but we have seen that there are journals where correlations exist and that there are journals where no correlations exist. In order to further investigate the question of why the correlations only occur in relation to some educational science journals, we have put forward the idea that the differences are related to different readerships. In fact, the readership of educational journals is very diverse. It ranges from the scientific community to educational practitioners and the general public. We see this finding as characteristic of a SSH discipline. Furthermore, we were able to show that there are correlations between the classification of the educational journals into the three target group clusters and the corresponding correlation coefficients of the journals. If the journals exclusively address the scientific community, the correlations between download numbers and citation numbers are higher. The journals in the educational practice and public sphere clusters, on the other hand, do not give a clear indication of a weaker correlation. No patterns could be identified in this respect.