SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS

Social Scientific Analysis

Social Scientific Analysis

Introduction

The object of the paper is the joint publications of authors from the 10 new EU member-states in the field of social sciences. The present study was based on the material of SSCI DB for 2002. As is well known social sciences and humanities are a small part of the world's overall scientific production (in NSI system social sciences make 8% and humanities only 3% of the total number of publications). It should be kept in mind that publications in those fields are mostly devoted to local and regional problems, and accordingly are not included in ISI DB.

Research cooperation is witnessed by the authors' addresses: if a paper has two or more authors from different countries, it belongs to the material of the present study. In SSCI DB there are 1060 publications, whose authors' addresses were in would-be new member-states of EU.

Research activity and citation statistics

According to NSI Standard version: 1998-2002 saw 3 599 665 papers in the fields of science and social science published with USA as world leader contributing 34.17% of publication. The scientists from 15 EU member-states authored 37.13% of all papers, the share of the ten EU candidate-countries is 2.99% (more than 107 thousand papers), which is roughly equal to that of the 32 countries of Latin America (3.16% of all countries or more than 113 thousand papers).

The cited papers constitute 59.87% of all papers in NSI DB and 63.15% of all papers in EU countries. The corresponding figures of the 15 EU countries, except Greece, are higher - from 69.2 (Denmark) to 57.92 (Portugal). As for 10 EU candidate countries they vary little around the average figure in DB NSI (except Slovakia and Malta) and much lower than average figure for 15 EU countries. To some extent lesser citedness is due to language barriers, but the primary factor is quality of the work. Both quality and quantity of scientific production is reflected in the total number of citation of papers from this or that country.

The 'Citation Impact' is the ration of number of citation to the number of publications. The measure is effective as a tool of differentiation of both single countries and organizations. The average figure of Citation Impact in DB NSI is 4.25 and 4.54 for EU counties. The most significant differences among 15 EU countries are Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Sweden with higher Citation Impact and all 10 EU candidate-countries - with low Citation Impact less than 2.75; only two countries Estonia (the former USSR country) and Hungary exceed the figure at 3.

Research Activity and Citation statistics in science and social science for period 1998-2002 for those countries is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. DB NSI Standard version:1998-2002

Countries

% of world total

Number of papers

% cited papers

Citation impact

EU countries

1

UK

9.30

334,676

64.98

5.25

2

Germany

8.82

317,370

63.95

4.97

3

France

6.34

228,185

62.82

4.66

4

Italy

4.18

150,417

63.01

4.61

5

Spain

2.95

106,115

61.12

3.84

6

Netherlands

2.56

92,220

67.97

5.71

7

Sweden

2.05

73,644

67.79

5.17

8

Belgium

1.35

48,572

65.10

4.94

9

Denmark

1.04

37,609

69.17

5.58

10

Finland

0.98

35,259

65.92

4.92

11

Austria

0.95

34,156

62.63

4.57

12

Greece

0.66

23,668

54.80

2.78

13

Portugal

0.42

15,008

57.92

3.19

14

Ireland

0.36

12,975

59.67

4.19

15

Luxembourg

0.01

440

61.59

3.49

EU candidate-countries

1

Poland

1.26

45,325

53.60

2.54

2

Czech rep

0.57

20,398

54.30

2.67

3

Hungary

0.52

18,874

57.53

3.22

4

Slovakia

0.25

9102

50.20

2.27

5

Slovenia

0.17

6276

52.17

2.51

6

Estonia

0.08

2700

59.33

3.38

7

Lithuania

0.06

2287

51.12

2.74

8

Latvia

0.05

1638

51.28

2.52

9

Cyprus

0.02

692

51.16

2.49

10

Malta

0.01

210

49.05

2.74

3. Research cooperation in the social sciences: results of study

In social sciences research activity is much lower than in science, e.g. in 2002 England had 13112 publications, Germany 4762, France 2363, Italy ...