Abstract We explore the potential of libcitations from local research‐oriented and public library catalogues for a study of the societal and cultural impact of books authored by academics from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The study relies on data from the bibliographic database VABB‐SHW, the Flemish public library catalogue Cultuurconnect, and the Belgian research library catalogue UniCat. We find that whereas a majority of academically authored SSH books appear in research‐oriented libraries, the holdings in public libraries are limited. However, libcitations in public libraries are indicative of societal and cultural impact, particularly for books written in the domestic language (in this case Dutch) and books that are not primarily aimed at academic peers (and are not peer‐reviewed). Additionally, we find that the books held in local libraries include different genres and dissemination types, as SSH scholars contribute to the creation of societal and cultural impact in a variety of ways. An overview of the types of books attaining high scores in public and research‐oriented libraries showcases avenues for the creation of societal impact through popularized literature.

Abstract Social sciences are increasingly recognized as significant for building a sustainable world since the social perspective can assist researchers in other fields in navigating public controversy and designing more responsible interaction mechanisms between the natural and social systems. However, the question arises: to what extent do natural sciences rely on social science research in their studies? Examining life science publications from seven PLoS journals, this paper attempts to characterize the volume and trajectory of citations from life sciences to social sciences. We explore three core questions: To what extent do life sciences cite social sciences? What actors in the life sciences are citing social sciences? Which actors in the social sciences are being cited? Our analysis estimates social sciences influence 15%–19% of life science publications, contributing to 1.1%–1.5% of references in 2018. Social science citers are found across peripheral and central topics of life science disciplines. Cited social science publications exhibit various levels of interdisciplinarity and achieve the greatest citation impact among peers. Citations to social sciences are prevalent in both theoretically and methodologically oriented sections. We show empirically the increasing impact of social sciences on the development of the life sciences.

Abstract This study contributes to the recent discussions on indicating interdisciplinarity, that is, going beyond catch‐all metrics of interdisciplinarity. We propose a contextual framework to improve the granularity and usability of the existing methodology for interdisciplinary knowledge flow (IKF) in which scientific disciplines import and export knowledge from/to other disciplines. To characterize the knowledge exchange between disciplines, we recognize three aspects of IKF under this framework, namely broadness, intensity, and homogeneity. We show how to utilize them to uncover different forms of interdisciplinarity, especially between disciplines with the largest volume of IKF. We apply this framework in two use cases, one at the level of disciplines and one at the level of journals, to show how it can offer a more holistic and detailed viewpoint on the interdisciplinarity of scientific entities than aggregated and context‐unaware indicators. We further compare our proposed framework, an indicating process, with established indicators and discuss how such information tools on interdisciplinarity can assist science policy practices such as performance‐based research funding systems and panel‐based peer review processes.

Abstract This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top‐tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top‐tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top‐tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top‐tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric‐informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.

Abstract Interdisciplinary research is widely recognized as necessary to tackle some of the grand challenges facing humanity. It is generally believed that interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly prevalent among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. However, little is known about the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Also, how interdisciplinarity and its various aspects evolve over time has seldom been closely quantified and delineated. This paper answers these questions by capturing the disciplinary diversity of the knowledge base of scientific publications in nine broad Social Sciences fields over 55 years. The analysis considers diversity as a whole and its three distinct aspects, namely variety, balance, and disparity. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are also conducted to investigate whether such change, if any, can be found among research with similar characteristics. We find that learning widely and digging deeply have become one of the norms among researchers in Social Sciences. Fields acting as knowledge exporters or independent domains maintain a relatively stable homogeneity in their knowledge base while the knowledge base of importer disciplines evolves towards greater heterogeneity. However, the increase of interdisciplinarity is substantially smaller when controlling for several author and publication related variables.

We investigate the state of multilingualism across the social sciences and humanities (SSH) using a comprehensive data set of research outputs from seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Flanders [Belgium], Norway, Poland, and Slovenia). Although English tends to be the dominant language of science, SSH researchers often produce culturally and societally relevant work in their local languages. We collected and analyzed a set of 164,218 peer-reviewed journal articles (produced by 51,063 researchers from 2013 to 2015) and found that multilingualism is prevalent despite geographical location and field. Among the researchers who published at least three journal articles during this time period, over one-third from the various countries had written their work in at least two languages. The highest share of researchers who published in only one language were from Flanders (80.9%), whereas the lowest shares were from Slovenia (57.2%) and Poland (59.3%). Our findings show that multilingual publishing is an ongoing practice in many SSH research fields regardless of geographical location, political situation, and/or historical heritage. Here we argue that research is international, but multilingual publishing keeps locally relevant research alive with the added potential for creating impact.

This is a publisher ranking study based on a citation data grant from Elsevier, specifically, book titles cited in Scopus history journals (2007–2011) and matching metadata from WorldCat® (i.e., OCLC numbers, ISBN codes, publisher records, and library holding counts). Using both resources, we have created a unique relational database designed to compare citation counts to books with international library holdings or libcitations for scholarly book publishers. First, we construct a ranking of the top 500 publishers and explore descriptive statistics at the level of publisher type (university, commercial, other) and country of origin. We then identify the top 50 university presses and commercial houses based on total citations and mean citations per book (CPB). In a third analysis, we present a map of directed citation links between journals and book publishers. American and British presses/publishing houses tend to dominate the work of library collection managers and citing scholars; however, a number of specialist publishers from Europe are included. Distinct clusters from the directed citation map indicate a certain degree of regionalism and subject specialization, where some journals produced in languages other than English tend to cite books published by the same parent press. Bibliometric rankings convey only a small part of how the actual structure of the publishing field has evolved; hence, challenges lie ahead for developers of new citation indices for books and bibliometricians interested in measuring book and publisher impacts.

The Semantic Web has been criticized for not being semantic. This article examines the questions of why and how the Web of Data, expressed in the Resource Description Framework (RDF), has come to be known as the Semantic Web. Contrary to previous papers, we deliberately take a descriptive stance and do not start from preconceived ideas about the nature of semantics. Instead, we mainly base our analysis on early design documents of the (Semantic) Web. The main determining factor is shown to be link typing, coupled with the influence of online metadata. Both factors already were present in early web standards and drafts. Our findings indicate that the Semantic Web is directly linked to older artificial intelligence work, despite occasional claims to the contrary. Because of link typing, the Semantic Web can be considered an example of a semantic network. Originally network representations of the meaning of natural language utterances, semantic networks have eventually come to refer to any networks with typed (usually directed) links. We discuss possible causes for this shift and suggest that it may be due to confounding paradigmatic and syntagmatic semantic relations.

In a previous work (Egghe, 2011), the first author showed that Benford's law (describing the logarithmic distribution of the numbers 1, 2, … , 9 as first digits of data in decimal form) is related to the classical law of Zipf with exponent 1. The work of Campanario and Coslado (2011), however, shows that Benford's law does not always fit practical data in a statistical sense. In this article, we use a generalization of Benford's law related to the general law of Zipf with exponent β > 0. Using data from Campanario and Coslado, we apply nonlinear least squares to determine the optimal β and show that this generalized law of Benford fits the data better than the classical law of Benford.

Abstract Contrary to what one might expect, Nobel laureates and Fields medalists have a rather large fraction (10% or more) of uncited publications. This is the case for (in total) 75 examined researchers from the fields of mathematics (Fields medalists), physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine (Nobel laureates). We study several indicators for these researchers, including the h‐index, total number of publications, average number of citations per publication, the number (and fraction) of uncited publications, and their interrelations. The most remarkable result is a positive correlation between the h‐index and the number of uncited articles. We also present a Lotkaian model, which partially explains the empirically found regularities.

Abstract Temporal growth of the h‐index in a diachronous cumulative time series is predicted to be linear by Hirsch (2005), whereas other models predict a concave increase. Actual data generally yield a linear growth or S‐shaped growth. We study the h‐index's growth in computer simulations of the publication‐citation process. In most simulations the h‐index grows linearly in time. Only occasionally does an S‐shape occur, while in our simulations a concave increase is very rare. The latter is often signalled by the occurrence of plateaus—periods of h‐index stagnation. Several parameters and their influence on the h‐index's growth are determined and discussed.