Bibliometric indicators and the social sciences

Abstract

Social science research is published in a wider variety of publication types and addresses more national issues than natural science research. This makes the construction of internationally comparable bibliometric indicators somewhat problematic. However, in internationally oriented fields, like economics and psychology, bibliometric indicators can provide a reasonable measure of the publishing size and impact of these research communities. The UK share of the world publications in the social sciences and behavioural sciences increased between 1981 and 1998 according to data derived from the National Science Indicators on diskette (NSIOD) produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The UK has its largest percentage share of world papers in environmental studies and geography & development. Its strongest growth in percentage share of world papers was in the management sciences. The UK share of psychology publications grew from 7% to 10% and economics publications grew from 10% to 13% over the 18-year time interval. England displayed its greatest growth in the percentage share of UK publications in rehabilitation, Scotland in communications, Wales in library & information sciences and North Ireland in psychology. It is shown in this report that the conventional impact indicator (citations/paper) gives a distorted view of the UK's impact because impact increases non-linearly with publishing size. A new indicator, the relative international citation impact (RICI) indicator that has been corrected to account for the non-linear relationship between impact and publishing size, is introduced. Using a sequence of fourteen 5-year overlapping time periods, the RICI indicator portrays a different picture of the impact of UK psychology and economics research than the conventional impact indicator. It shows that UK impact exceeded the US impact in psychology across all 13 time intervals and it matched or exceeded the US impact in economics in 8 out of the 13 intervals

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.