Improving the coverage of social science and humanities researchers' output: The case of the Érudit journal platform

Vincent Larivière and Benoit Macaluso

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2011, vol. 62, issue 12, 2437-2442

Abstract: In non‐English‐speaking countries the measurement of research output in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) using standard bibliographic databases suffers from a major drawback: the underrepresentation of articles published in local, non‐English, journals. Using papers indexed (1) in a local database of periodicals (Érudit) and (2) in the Web of Science, assigned to the population of university professors in the province of Québec, this paper quantifies, for individual researchers and departments, the importance of papers published in local journals. It also analyzes differences across disciplines and between French‐speaking and English‐speaking universities. The results show that, while the addition of papers published in local journals to bibliometric measures has little effect when all disciplines are considered and for anglophone universities, it increases the output of researchers from francophone universities in the social sciences and humanities by almost a third. It also shows that there is very little relation, at the level of individual researchers or departments, between the output indexed in the Web of Science and the output retrieved from the Érudit database; a clear demonstration that the Web of Science cannot be used as a proxy for the “overall” production of SSH researchers in Québec. The paper concludes with a discussion on these disciplinary and language differences, as well as on their implications for rankings of universities.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21632

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:62:y:2011:i:12:p:2437-2442

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().