The changes of publication and citation patterns in political science

The publication behavior of German political scientists is changing. Figure 4 in section 4.2.2 shows that the relative share of book chapters, edited books and authored books increases during 2003-2007 (from 50.5% in total to 56.2%), whereas the share of journal articles (ISI journal articles and non-ISI journal articles) decreases during this time (from 23.6% to 18.1%).

Monograph publications are the main contribution to the political science publications in Germany, and in a greater proportion than other countries such as Flanders and Norway (see Table 35). The increase of monograph publications is not significant but shows the stable status of being the main publication type.

Although the overall share of journal articles decreases, the ratio of ISI journal articles to non-ISI journal articles is increasing every year. Figure 4 shows that the amount of non-ISI journal articles increases over the five years but the amount of non-ISI journal articles decreases.

According to personal communication with one of the professors from the sample, it becomes clear that he has to turn to journals with high prestige, both for submitting papers and being an editor or reviewer, due to limited time. Not many German local journals meet certain criteria. This may be one of the reasons why the numbers of non-ISI journal articles are diminishing.

Languages

Language preference is slightly changing year by year from German to English as revealed in Figure 5. Considering the share of items in German to items in all languages specifically, as

shown in Figure 27, there is a strong decrease in German language conference papers, and most markedly in non-ISI journal articles, which decreased significantly from 78% down to 48% in five years (Chi-squared test, p < 0.05). The increase of conference papers in English is expected, due to their international orientation. This suggests that these professors attend more international conferences than before.

Figure 27. Shares of items in German to all languages by publication year Note: The document type categories in this figure are ordered by the % of items in German in 2003.

However, why are non-ISI journal articles, which are seen as more locally oriented publication channels, not published more in the local language? A personal communication with one of the professors revealed that publishing in English can be regarded as a trend (however, in the dataset of this study it shows the number of publications in English is increasing but the increase from 37% to 44%, is not statistically significant. See Figure 5), since even German journals (e.g., Politische Vierteljahresschrift) start to ask authors to provide English titles and abstracts when submitting a paper in German¹⁰. This may possibly be a reason why these political scientists publish fewer non-ISI journal articles in German, but further exploration is needed.

10 One of the reasons is that those journals want to be covered by WoS and Scopus, therefore English bibliographic data are needed.

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Another study from the perspective of source items (van Leeuwen, 2013) shows a trend in political science and public administration: the number of German authors’ WoS-indexed articles in English from 1981 to 2010 increased, but the output in German remained stable. In the sample of this study, German political scientists tend to publish non-ISI journal articles more in English, while no clear trend of language change is apparent in ISI journal articles.

In fact, the percentage of ISI journal articles in German to all languages even increases slightly from 2003 to 2007 (from 15.4% to 22.2%, in Figure 27), but it could not be regarded as a trend, due to the actual numbers of ISI journal articles in German being very small (2 in 2003 and 4 in 2007).

Main dissemination networks

As concluded in section 5.1.2 there are two communication networks, a local one and an international one, generated by differently oriented output. The local one reduced its coverage slightly during the time span from above evidences, such as the insignificant decrease of the share of publications in German (from 61% to 53%, Figure 5). In addition, the share of monographs in German remains stable (from 69.5% to 70.1%, Figure 27), but the share of non-ISI journal articles in German decreased significantly (from 78% down to 48%%, Figure 27). All these findings point to the local dissemination network becoming slightly smalleras time elapses.

In contrast, the international network increased its volume slightly. The share of publications in English increased, but not significantly (from 37% to 44%, see Figure 5). The share of conference papers in English as a percentage of all languages increased from 73% to 86% in five years. ISI journal articles increased slightly from 2003 to 2007 (the share of all document type items is from 6% to 8%), but the share of ISI journal articles in English as a percentage of all languages decreased during the period (from 85% to 78%). In general, the international audience grew slightly, leading to the observation of the increase in international orientation over time in the sample set of this study.

Individual publishing behaviors

The younger political scientists publish more in English and in WoS source journals, thus attaining a higher citation impact than older researchers (see Individual analyses in section 4.2.1, 4.3.1, and Table 27 in section 4.3.3). Furthermore, the personal communication with one of the professors from the sample in this study indicates that the professor prefers

collaboration with other researchers while publishing journal articles rather than book chapters, for the former are peer-reviewed and seen as prestigious. After publishing several articles, he would collect articles to the same topic in order to publish them as a book. However, the total amount of book chapters (39%, in Table 9) is still the majority of all German political science publications in this study.