Globalization of the social sciences in Eastern Europe: genuine breakthrough or a slippery slope of the research evaluation practice?

Abstract

The introduction of new research evaluation policies in most of the Eastern European (EE) countries was followed by the substantial growth in their (international) scientific productivity. The article starts with a brief review of the current research evaluation practice in EE countries and then explores the pattern of changes in international scientific production of 20 EE countries in the field of social sciences and humanities during 2004–2013. A new indicator named Journal Diversity Index (JDI) is suggested as a possible measure of sustainability and genuineness of the globalization of social sciences in EE countries. JDI represents the number of journals that account for 50 % of country’s published articles, corrected for the total number of unique journals in which articles by the authors from all EE countries appear. The analysis has shown that EE countries with the lower JDI largely base their international scientific production on national journals covered by Web of Science (WoS). Those countries also have a lower average citation rate of articles. With the exception of Hungary and Poland, the “globalization” of EE social sciences still rely strongly on language, regional and cultural proximities. This is potentially harmful given the unstable status of EE journals in WoS. EE science policy institutions should take more responsibility in controlling the quality of national journals indexed in international databases. They should also be aware of significant differences in the coverage policies of Thomson Reuters and Elsevier and possible implications of those differences for the science evaluation practice.