Heine Andersen (2000)

Table 2. The most influential researcher in the world according to Danish social science researchers, by researchers’ academic disciplines. Citations in SSCI 1992–1996:                                                           

Table 4. The most influential sociologists: 1. according to citations in top-ranked sociology journals; 2. according to citations in

Table 5. The most influential economist: 1. from a survey of 212 graduate

Table 6. The most important journals for Danish social science researchers, by researchers’ academic disciplines. Impact factor

(p.688):

"The distinctive character of legal science regarding consensus on most important

journal is of course owing to the traditional status of this discipline as a profession.

Again it is unusual in its much stronger national orientation. Numbers one, two and six on this list are Danish, number three Swedish, and four and five European. Only one is indexed in SSCI, and with a very low impact factor.

(Anglo-American bias in SSCI is very strong in the case of law journals.).

Among the other disciplines, concentration is biggest in economics and smallest in political science. Further, the economics list once more reflects a very heavy Anglo-American dominance."

Several earlier studies have shown fairly strong correlations between citation

frequencies and other indicators of quality or influence (e.g. awards, peer assessment,

prestige of department (see reviews by Hemlin [16, pp. 2.13�2.20] and

Baird and Oppenheim [17]). Further, strong correlations were reported by

Oppenheim in his studies of the association between citation counts and the ratings

in the 1992 British Research Assessment Exercise in genetics, anatomy and

archaeology [18] and library and information science [19]. On the other hand,

critics have pointed to the limitations and invalidating factors of a technical

nature regarding citation data, as well as the very validity of citation counts as

a measure of research quality [16, 17, 20].

In the current study, the correlation actually is very low (Spearman�s rho =

0.17). This weak association could partly be owing to the fact that the question

was about the most influential person in the respondents� own disciplines, while

citation data cover all disciplines, but actually one should expect researchers to

cite authors from their own disciplines. Another more obvious reason of course

could be the difference concerning time perspective.

utilization of a common set of journals is one indicator of the integration of

a scientific discipline.

only one quarter of the publications (all types, including conference papers, etc.) disseminated by social

scientists are journal articles, compared with 66% in natural science and medicine.

most respondents in the survey from the social sciences reported that they regularly read

between five and nine journals (mean: 8.5), while researchers from the natural

sciences and medicine on average read a couple of journals more.

the impact factor is a poor measure of the importance of social science journals (p. 688). the simple fact is that impact factors of social science journals generally are rather low (compared with natural science and medicine).

This indicates that differences are small between journals in terms of impact,

as measured by the SSCI data

The table actually reveals a wide variety in the respondents� journal reading

habits. Except for the rather exceptional case of legal science, the percentage of

researchers mentioning the same journal as one of the three most important is

25% or below. As a comparison, of the twenty physicists in the sample, 60% mentioned

Physical Review as one of their three most important journals.

Large national differences in evaluations of political science journals were also found in a study of British political scientists compared with American, so this higher degree of European/national orientation does not seem to be a peculiarity of Danish researchers

Literature:

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 25-03-2007

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