Journal article publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A comparison of Web of Science coverage for five European countries.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Petr M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8031415 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description: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.
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Project description:Health is more than the absence of disease. It is also more than a biological phenomenon. It is inherently social, psychological, cultural and historical. While this has been recognised by major health actors for decades, open questions remain as to how to build systems that reflect the complexity of health, disease and sickness, and in a context that is increasingly technologised. We argue that an urgent change of approach is necessary. Methods and concepts from the humanities and social science must be embedded in the concepts and methods of the health sciences if we are to promote sustainable interventions capable of engaging with the recognised complexity of health, disease and sickness. Our vision is one of radical interdisciplinarity, integrating aspects of biological, psychological, social and humanities approaches across areas of urgent health need. Radical interdisciplinarity, we argue, entails the practical, methodological and conceptual integration of these approaches to health.
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Project description:The areas of academic interest (sciences or humanities) and area of study have been known to be associated with a number of factors associated with autistic traits. However, despite the vast amount of literature on the psychological and physiological characteristics associated with faculty membership, brain structural characteristics associated with faculty membership have never been investigated directly. In this study, we used voxel-based morphometry to investigate differences in regional gray matter volume (rGMV)/regional white matter volume (rWMV) between science and humanities students to test our hypotheses that brain structures previously robustly shown to be altered in autistic subjects are related to differences in faculty membership. We examined 312 science students (225 males and 87 females) and 179 humanities students (105 males and 74 females). Whole-brain analyses of covariance revealed that after controlling for age, sex, and total intracranial volume, the science students had significantly larger rGMV in an anatomical cluster around the medial prefrontal cortex and the frontopolar area, whereas the humanities students had significantly larger rWMV in an anatomical cluster mainly concentrated around the right hippocampus. These anatomical structures have been linked to autism in previous studies and may mediate cognitive functions that characterize differences in faculty membership. The present results may support the ideas that autistic traits and characteristics of the science students compared with the humanities students share certain characteristics from neuroimaging perspectives. This study improves our understanding of differences in faculty membership which is the link among cognition, biological factors, disorders, and education (academia).
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Project description:In this article, we study the development of the STS journal article format since the 1980s. Our analysis is based on quantitative data that suggest that the diversity of various journal publication types has diminished over the past four decades, while the format of research articles has become increasingly typified. We contextualize these historical shifts in qualitative terms, drawing on a set of 76 interviews with STS scholars and other stakeholders in scholarly publishing. Here, we first portray the STS publication culture of the 1980s and early 1990s. We then contrast this with an analysis of publishing practices today, which are characterized by a much more structured research process that is largely organized around the production of typified journal articles. Whereas earlier studies have often emphasized the importance of rhetorical persuasion strategies as drivers in the development of scholarly communication formats, our analysis highlights a complementary and historically novel set of shaping factors, namely, increasingly quantified research (self-)assessment practices in the context of a projectification of academic life. We argue that reliance on a highly structured publication format is a distinct strategy for making STS scholarship 'doable' in the sense of facilitating the planning ability and daily conduct of research across a variety of levels - including the writing process, collaboration with peers, attracting funding, and interaction with journals. We conclude by reflecting on the advantages and downsides of the typification of journal articles for STS.
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Project description:ObjectiveThis study aims to find out the coverage of biomedical journals published in Sub-Saharan Africa in four authoritative international databases-Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE and EMBASE and two Africa-focused scholarly databases-Africa Journals Online (AJOL) and African Index Medicus (AIM).MethodsLists of active journals that are published in the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries were retrieved from the Ulrich periodical directory to create master journal lists. Unique journals from other databases that were not found in Ulrich were added to the master journal list. The six databases included in this study were searched for journals on the master lists.ResultsOnly 23 of the 46 Sub-Saharan African countries had at least one biomedical journal. Only about one-quarter (152) of the 560 biomedical journals from Sub-Saharan Africa were found in at least one of the biomedical databases. South African journals accounted for more than 50% of all the Sub-Saharan journals in the international scholarly databases. AJOL contains the highest number of biomedical journals from Sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Scopus and EMBASE. AJOL asserts its importance by covering the highest number of unique journals and having a representative number of journals in all biomedical sub-disciplines.ConclusionThe majority of studies from Sub-Saharan Africa are left out when biomedical evidence-based researchers only retrieve studies from authoritative international databases. Searching Google Scholar and the African research databases of AJOL and AIM would increase the number of studies from the region.
| S-EPMC10361549 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveTo explore authors' attitudes towards open access publishing and author charges, their perceptions of journals that charge authors, and whether they would be willing to submit to these journals.DesignSemistructured telephone interviews.Participants28 randomly selected international authors who submitted to the BMJ in 2003.ResultsAuthors were more aware of the concepts of open access publishing and author pays models than previously reported. Almost all authors supported the concept of open access, but few had submitted to an open access journal, other than the BMJ. Reasons for not submitting included lack of awareness of which journals publish with open access, and journal quality taking a higher priority in decision making than the availability of open access. Authors disliked the idea of author charges without institutional support and were concerned about implications for authors from developing countries and those without research funding. However, many said they would probably continue to submit to journals they perceived as being of high quality even if they charged authors.ConclusionsAuthors consider perceived journal quality as more important than open access when deciding where to submit papers. New journals with open access may need to do more to reassure authors of the quality of their journals.
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Project description:BackgroundPrevious research has not provided enough direction regarding effective content design of courses integrating the humanities and social sciences in medical and dental education. This study aims at exploring how an Integrated Medical/Dental Humanities-Social Medicine/Dentistry course may be designed; how effective it may be in terms of student growth in knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations; and associated factors.MethodsThe course was designed by distilling commonalities in the international standards for medical/dental education proposed by seven major health organizations. This analysis resulted in a curriculum covering nine major topics: history, professionalism, communication, ethics, management, policy, insurance, law, and research methodology. During the 2017 calendar year, data was collected and statistically analyzed from 68 third-year pre-doctoral students enrolled in the resulting MDHS 13-week course.ResultsParticipants showed growth in skills, aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes, with the greatest change occurring in skills, then aspirations, knowledge, and attitudes. Knowledge growth was the only variable significantly related to student achievement of course objectives (β = 0.635, t (63) = 3.394, p = 0.001). The topics that students perceived as most critical were insurance, policy, management, and law. The perceived importance of research was most common among participants and was significantly related to all learning outcomes (For knowledge, β = 0.213, t (63) = 2.203, p = 0.031; for attitudes, β = 0.784, t (63) = 10.257, p = 0.000; for skills, β = 0.769, t (63) = 9.772, p = 0.000; and aspirations β = 0.639, t (63) = 7.595, p = 0.000).ConclusionsThis study proposed a framework for humanities-social sciences education in health sciences education and analyzed its implementation. The empirical evaluation of its effectiveness and factors related to successful outcomes found that students perceived gains in their knowledge, attitudes, skills, and aspirations for humanistic and social aspects of dentistry/medicine. In addition, their recognition of the importance of research was associated with the greatest growth in all four learning outcomes. This study may contribute to the improved design of integrated humanities-social sciences courses.
| S-EPMC7168810 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) increasingly absorb knowledge from Hard Sciences, i.e., Science, Technology, Agriculture and Medicine (STAM), as testified by a growing number of citations. However, whether citing more Hard Sciences brings more citations to HSS remains to be investigated. Based on China's HSS articles indexed by the Web of Science during 1998-2014, this paper estimated two-way fixed effects negative binomial models, with journal effects and year effects. Findings include: (1) An inverse U-shaped curve was observed between the percentage of STAM references to the HSS articles and the number of citations they received; (2) STAM contributed increasing knowledge to China's HSS, while Science and Technology knowledge contributed more citations to HSS articles. It is recommended that research policy should be adjusted to encourage HSS researchers to adequately integrate STAM knowledge when conducting interdisciplinary research, as over-cited STAM knowledge may jeopardize the readability of HSS articles.
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Project description:Background: The recent COVID-19 pandemic dramatically underlined the multi-faceted nature of health research, requiring input from basic biological sciences, pharmaceutical technologies, clinical research), social sciences and public health and social engineering. Systems that could work across different disciplines would therefore seem to be a useful idea to explore. In this study we investigated whether metadata schemas and vocabularies used for discovering scientific studies and resources in the social sciences and humanities and in clinical research are similar enough to allow information from different source disciplines to be easily retrieved and presented together. Methods: As a first step a literature search was performed, exemplarily identifying studies and resources, in which data from social sciences and the humanities have been usefully employed or integrated with that from clinical research and clinical trials. In a second step a comparison of metadata schemas and related resource catalogues in ECRIN (European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network) and CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) was performed. The focus was on discovery metadata, here defined as the metadata elements used to identify and locate scientific resources. Results: A close view at the metadata schemas of CESSDA and ECRIN and the basic discovery metadata as well as a crosswalk between ECRIN and CESSDA metadata schemas have shown that there is considerable resemblance between them. Conclusions: The resemblance could serve as a promising starting point to implement a common search mechanism for ECRIN and CESSDA metadata. In the paper four different options for how to proceed with implementation issues are presented.
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Project description:The way science and research is done is rapidly becoming more open and collaborative. The traditional way of publishing new findings in journals is becoming increasingly outdated and no longer serves the needs of much of science. Whilst preprints can bring significant benefits of removing delay and selection, they do not go far enough if simply implemented alongside the existing journal system. We propose that we need a new approach, an Open Science Platform, that takes the benefits of preprints but adds formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review. This bypasses the problems of the current journal system and, in doing so, moves the evaluation of research and researchers away from the journal-based Impact Factor and towards a fairer system of article-based qualitative and quantitative indicators. In the long term, it should be irrelevant where a researcher publishes their findings. What is important is that research is shared and made available without delay within a framework that encourages quality standards and requires all players in the research community to work as collaborators.
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