A Quantitative Analysis of Scholarly Monograph Publishing by University Presses in Korea

Abstract

Scholarly monographs have been a main vehicle for knowledge representation and transfer as well as an important research outcome. University presses have long been considered as the last bastion for scholarly monographs that have low commercial prospect. Until now there has not been a systematic data analysis regarding scholarly monograph production by university presses in Korea. In this paper, we collected bibliographic records of university presses’ monograph publications between 1950 and 2015 using the National Library of Korea’s online catalog system. A total of 21,015 records were used in the analysis. In particular, for monographs published between 2001 and 2015, we categorized them into scholarly monographs and non-scholarly monographs. University presses’ publishing showed sharp increase during the 1990’s but is in decline after its peak in 2005. University presses seem to have engaged in publishing more non-scholarly monographs than scholarly monographs by a ratio of 6:4. Large university presses in size seem to produce higher proportions of scholarly monographs than smaller presses. In terms of authoring types, single authorship accounts for the highest proportion and on the increase. However, edited books are losing ground as translated books seem to hold steady. Monographs in social sciences have been published more frequently than any other subject areas as there seem to be significant discrepancies among subject areas in terms of the scholarly monograph proportion.