Conclusion

6.1.1 The characteristics of publications in political science

German political scientists surveyed in this study mostly published via three main channels, monographs, journal articles, and conference papers. There are two main communication networks in the publication pattern of German political scientists. The significant local communication network covers monographs and regionally oriented journalsthat are mainly written in German. Its importance has slightly decreased over time. On the other hand, the relatively smaller international one, which covers international peer reviewed journals and international conference papers in English, enlarged its coverage slightly. The international orientation of this network is shown by its amount of citations from English-speaking countries as well, as compared to the domestic audience of the local communication network in terms of the ratio to other countries. In the international communication network, the influence of the American community is large, likely owing to the American studies’ quality, impact and numbers.

The impact of ISI journal articles of the German political scientists in this study is much higher than the average in political science (compared to both Germany and the whole world). Items written in English with higher international visibility were not only published, but also cited more often in the past many years. However, it should be noted that this can only be verified from the perspective of citations from international journal articles. In addition, the publishing language influences the international impact (i.e., items in German are cited mostly by papers with author addresses from Germany or in German language), whereas being indexed by WoS or not has less influence on impact. This would support the opinion of Sivertsen and Larsen to treat the language of a publication channel as a marker of internationality (Sivertsen &

Larsen, 2012, p. 570).

Institutional publishing culture

The different publishing behaviors between the two institutions represent the different cultures of these educational systems in political science in Germany. It is not surprising that the modern-type one would benefit the evaluation result from an international perspective according to the results of this study. Therefore, an evaluation method designed to fit the publication publishing cultures of both modern- and traditional-type systems in political science is required in Germany.

Individual publishing behavior

The low average number of authors per publication shows that German political scientists tend to cooperate with just a few other researchers. This lends support to the summary of Nederhof (2006), explaining that a “single author” approach can be found in the social sciences unlike in the natural sciences. The younger political scientists publish more in English and in WoS journals, thus achieving a higher citation impact than older researchers from WoS. The different publishing behaviors between generations imply that a trend of international orientation has begun, although it is not significant yet.

Highly cited items

The top 5% cited items of each document type, contribute to nearly 50% (or more) of citations and are mainly published in English. The results of citation analyses on highly cited items are similar to the results of previous citation analyses on all items in this study, showing the dominance of highly cited items over other publications.

This study confirms that highly cited items in political science are authored by more researchers on average and have lower shares of self-citations than non-highly-cited items as shown in previous studies in the natural sciences (Aksnes, 2003a; Glänzel et al., 1995; Aversa, 1985). However, the highly cited items are not cited by more foreign researchers as found in one previous study (Aksnes, 2003a).

International and local orientation

As mentioned above, the growing international communication network, the change of language preference, and the different publishing behaviors between generations reveal an increasing trend in international orientation over time in the sample set. Even though the trend

is not significant yet, it emergence demonstrate an agreement with the results of other studies in the social sciences.

German political science publications attract most citations from countries other than Germany. Although about 40% of citations of all items, a higher rate of domestic citations than Norwegian ones (19%), likely because of the size of the nations, are from articles with at least one address in Germany, the publications have a larger share (68%) of citations from articles with at least one address from non-German countries. This result might challenge the notion of political science as a locally-oriented field in the social sciences; however, it reflects only the biased characteristics of citations from WoS and therefore the level of local orientation in this field is underestimated.

To sum up, until 2007, political science in Germany remains locally oriented in substance, but an initial increase of its international orientation can already be observed. A growing degree of international orientation in this field can be expected as time elapses. This result supports the statement of Luwel et al. (1999) that some fields in the social sciences and humanities, for instance law, linguistics, sociology, public administration, or political sciences, have a relatively strong regional or national orientation, although there is an international research frontier in humanities research (Luwel et al., 1999, cited by Nederhof, 2006)

Political science in the social sciences

The different publication patterns across countries show that bigger countries may have a stronger traditional publication culture than smaller countries because of their bigger local community. First, the culture of monograph orientation in political science in Germany is affirmed. German political scientists publish many more monographs, but fewer journal articles and conference papers than other social science fields in Australia and the Netherlands (Butler & Visser, 2006; Nederhof et al., 1993). Compared to other political scientists in Norway and Flanders (Sivertsen & Larsen, 2012; Engels et al., 2012), they still publish monographs in a greater frequency than journal articles. Second, German political scientists publish relatively more publications in their local language than in international languages compared to other countries’ political scientists (Sivertsen & Larsen, 2012; Engels et al., 2012).

Differences in publication and citation patterns in many fields in the social sciences are large, although there is a tendency that science communication patterns are increasingly found

(Nederhof, 2006). The heterogeneity among fields in the social sciences is significant. This study even shows that countries of different sizes may have different publication characteristics in the same field. Therefore, the interpretations across fields and countries need to be considered carefully. However, some features are universal in the social science and humanities. The importance of books in the social sciences stated in the summary of the literature in section 2.2 is confirmed. Concerning the average citation rate and uncited rate, books (including authored and edited books) have a higher impact than other non-source items in the social sciences (this study, Amez, 2013; Butler & Visser, 2006) and other disciplines (Nederhof et al., 1993).

6.1.2 The characteristics and impact of non-source items in political science

The top five document types, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, edited books and books, constitute almost all non-source items. Compared to source items, non-source items are more often written in German than in English. Researchers at Mannheim University publish more non-source items in English than in German, whereas at University of Münster, more non-source items are published in German than in English. Most of all researchers publish non-source items predominantly. However, non-source items, especially those in German, are cited less in WoS, and attract fewer citations from other countries, compared to source items.

Impact

Even though the increase caused by non-source items in numbers of publications is massive, the additional publications do not lead to an increase in the average citation rates and h-indices to a concordant amount. Non-source items benefit from the design of h-index instead of the average citation rate, which reveals the effect of highly cited publications better. However, the small and similar values of h-indices of German political scientists show the limitation to distinguish the performance of each individual by using h-index. Applying h-index to evaluate German political scientists is not recommended.

Non-source Citations

The actual percentage of citations missed is likely to be much higher when counting citations from non-source items in addition to those to non-source items. The impact of non-source items reported in this study is only based on the WoS citations as it is the most reliable citation

source, and is therefore systematically underestimated due to the missing “non-source citations”. This limitation is discussed in this study and leads to an estimation to investigate the comprehensive citation record beyond WoS. The estimation implies that the inclusion of non-source items could increase citations.

The characteristics of non-source citations in political science include: books are cited by books more than by journal articles, books and journal articles are all cited more by books than by journal articles. The supplement tests in this study prove that books receive more citations from books than journal articles do, but the degree of books to be cited by books is not more than journal articles as above, due to the limited BKCI coverage.

Political science in the social sciences

The non-source items in political science in Germany include much fewer non-ISI journal articles and conference papers, but many more book chapters than other countries’ political science (Sivertsen & Larsen, 2012; Engels et al., 2012). This indicates that the degree of localization in political science in Germany is higher than in other smaller countries. Moreover, the increase in citations from WoS to non-source items in political science in Germany does not reach the same level as non-source items in politics and policy in Australia (Butler &

Visser, 2006), but the increase in estimated citations does. These findings strongly imply that German non-source items may be underestimated by the internationally-oriented database.

Therefore, a more comprehensive bibliometric citation database in the social sciences is necessary for a higher quality of evaluations in the social sciences.