A Case Study of German Language Core Journals for Characterizing Citation Patterns in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Publication practices in the social sciences are characterized by the use of heterogeneous publication channels and a stronger national focus (Nederhof, 2006; Hicks & Wang, 2011). At the same time the use of bibliometric indicators in research evaluation promotes journal articles in international peer reviewed journals as the main style of publishing research results. The question emerges to which extent this changes publication practices in these disciplines. In our contribution we address this question and present results of a case study which investigates publication and referencing patterns of core German language journals in sociology and political science. Based on an explorative analysis of reference lists we describe patterns and changes of the parameters of the knowledge base of these journals. The analysis of the results in this study shows that with a total of 67% in the sociology and 76% in the political science the core German journals predominantly refer to non-journal publications. Besides, the share of non-source publications basically remains constant in the time period 2000-2009, and the share of references to source journals is the same in both disciplines. The difference between sociology and political science is: publications in the German language sociology journals have more references to monographs (46%) than publications in the German language political science journals (38%), but these political science journals reference to other non-source publications (38%) much more than sociology (21%).