Do social sciences and humanities behave like life and hard sciences?

Andrea Bonaccorsi, Cinzia Daraio, Stefano Fantoni, Viola Folli, Marco Leonetti and Giancarlo Ruocco ()
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Andrea Bonaccorsi: University of Pisa
Cinzia Daraio: University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
Stefano Fantoni: Fondazione Internazionale Trieste
Viola Folli: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
Marco Leonetti: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
Giancarlo Ruocco: Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)

Scientometrics, 2017, vol. 112, issue 1, No 33, 607-653

Abstract: Abstract The quantitative evaluation of Social Science and Humanities (SSH) and the investigation of the existing similarities between SSH and Life and Hard Sciences (LHS) represent the forefront of scientometrics research. We analyse the scientific production of the universe of Italian academic scholars , over a 10-year period across 2002–2012, from a national database built by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes. We demonstrate that all Italian scholars of SSH and LHS are equals, as far as their publishing habits. They share the same general law, which is a lognormal. At the same time, however, they are different, because we measured their scientific production with different indicators required by the Italian law; we eliminated the “silent” scholars and obtained different scaling values—proxy of their productivity rates. Our findings may be useful to further develop indirect quali–quantitative comparative analysis across heterogeneous disciplines and, more broadly, to investigate on the generative mechanisms behind the observed empirical regularities.

Keywords: Evaluation; Bibliometrics; Social sciences and humanities; Normalization; Scaling; Universality; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2384-0

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